freebsd stable - Jan 2009 - HEADS UP: snd_hda MFC plan

If there will be no objections, I am going to merge latest snd_hda 
driver from HEAD to 7-STABLE next days. Driver was extensively tested by 
many people with numerous hardware on both HEAD and 7-STABLE and 
provides many significant benefits. Discussions can be found on 
multimedia@ list.

The most user-visible difference, is that new driver often provides 
several audio devices even on simple systems. That devices refer the 
different physical or logical audio hardware parts and using different 
hardware connectors. This feature described in details in updated man page.

On most systems having several devices is not a problem, as mostly used 
analog connectors are usually detected first. But on some systems (for 
example, having separate HDMI ports on video cards, which are now also 
supported and often detected first), user may be required to explicitly 
configure his audio applications or by using hw.snd.default_unit sysctl 
globally specify default audio device he wants to use. This moment 
explicitly specified in updated man page and I am going to specify it in 
UPDATING.

-- 
Alexander Motin

Quoting Alexander Motin <mav@FreeBSD.org> (from Tue, 06 Jan 2009  
00:13:58 +0200):
> On most systems having several devices is not a problem, as mostly  
> used analog connectors are usually detected first. But on some  
> systems (for example, having separate HDMI ports on video cards,  
> which are now also supported and often detected first), user may be  
> required to explicitly configure his audio applications or by using  
> hw.snd.default_unit sysctl globally specify default audio device he  
> wants to use. This moment explicitly specified in updated man page  
> and I am going to specify it in UPDATING.
Is there a way to move those HDMI ports to the end (either in pcmX or  
in the probing) somehow? If yes, it would be more POLA to do this  
instead of requiring the users to do something.

And related: do all detected analog ports appear in a sensible order?  
What I mean is again POLA related. If someone updates from 7.1 to 7.2,  
will he be required to do something to get sound out of the same  
connector as before when connecting to the default audio device? If  
not, is it possible for you to introduce some corresponding sorting  
before MFCing?

Bye,
Alexander.

-- 
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lower the mailing cost.
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http://www.Leidinger.net    Alexander @ Leidinger.net: PGP ID = B0063FE7
http://www.FreeBSD.org       netchild @ FreeBSD.org  : PGP ID = 72077137