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I got kind of bored on Sunday afternoon, and decided to do a port from FreeBSD of the driver for the ESS Solo-1 card. (I got one of these cards shipped to me by mistake from a vendor that didn't know the difference between different chips.)

It was getting late on Sunday, but I was almost ready to test. I resolved that when the system panic()'d, I'd call it a night and go get some sleep.

Amazingly, the system never panic()'d. I think this is the first time that I've brought up a new device driver (with a lot of new code!) without crashing the system at least once. (Usually its significantly more than that!) Hence, this may be the only device driver I know of that is both functional, and has never been the cause of a system crash.

Well, I wound up continuing to hack during testing -- never did make it to bed, and now its pretty much done. I'll post test binaries if someone else wants them. I still have to test suspend/resume and quiesce. There is also a bug where the record channels are swapped. This stumped me for several hours until I finally realized that my channel remapping facility in Boomer isn't supported for input channels, only for output (playback). Guess I'll have to go back and add that feature in to Boomer. (Its a small change, and now I've got a need for it.)

The driver is called "audiosolo", and will only be supported for x86 systems (the hardware can't address past the upper 24-bits of memory, so its useless on SPARC). Its only capable of 16-bit stereo record and playback, but these cards are apparently still sold as very low-cost budget add-in boards. (They are also found on some systems.) Look for ES1938 on the chip.

If you want the driver, let me know and I'll ship out some binaries. It will probably go into the next build or so, as I have time to get through the C-Team paperwork. I'm not meant to be working this during the "day job", as I have other priorities at present. But it might be a nice bonus for someone anyway. :-)