Notes on 1.0.8-rc1 (and post-rc1)

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

Hi,

as you might have already noticed, ALSA 1.0.8-rc1 was released
recently.  Some major changes are listed below...

Drivers:

- ioctl32 fixes
   The broken ioctl32 on 2.6 kernels is fixed.

- Hotplug support
   vxpocket, vx222 and mixart can use hotplug to load firmware.
   The old mechanism is activated only when the fw loader is disabled
   on kernel.
   echoaudio drivers (added after rc1) _require_ the kernel fw loader.

- Audigy2 Value support

- audigyls driver was renamed to ca0106
   It supports SB Live 24bit, too

- Hwdep-PCM support on usb-usx2y (for JACK)

- Resume/suspend fixes

- New drivers: pcxhr, sun-dbri

- Fix OOps on vxpocket

- Fix invalid HDSP pointers

- Lots of cleanups

Lib:

- Suppress (some of) non-fatal error messages
   See NOTES for details.

Utils:

- Improvements on alsamixer
   See manpage.

Tools & firmware:

- Hotplug support (for vx and mixart)


And, after rc1 release, many changes have been applied to CVS.
The below are some of them.

- Fix PPC OOps on OSS emulation

- Fix control device creation with udev

- AC97 code cleanups (including new quirk support)

- Addition of echoaudio drivers
   (The drivers need the firmware loader support on kernel.)

- Experimental softvol PCM plugin


The last one may need a bit more explanation.
This plugin is for the boards equipped with codecs which have no
volume controls (e.g. some c-media codecs).  The plugin can add a new
user-defined control and apply the volume attenuation.

The typical usage is like below:

pcm.svol {
	type softvol
	slave.pcm hw:0
	control {
		name "PCM Playback Volume"
	}
}

After you put this to ~/.asoundrc, run "aplay -Dsvol foo.wav".
Then the PCM volume is created (if not exists yet).
Note that the volume element will appear first after you run this
softvol PCM.  Don't forget to raise the volume.

For the practical use, the combination with dmix would make your life
often easier.  You can override the "default" PCM like below:

pcm.!default {
	type plug
	slave.pcm {
		type softvol
		slave.pcm dmix
		control {
			card hw:0
			name "PCM Playback Volume"
		}
	}
}

Caveats: the new control is not restored correctly with alsactl after
reboot.  This will be fixed in future.  Also, note that softvol
supports only S16 format.


Takashi


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