"ALSA and kernel developer Takashi Iwai has received an open
source driver for X-Fi PCI sound cards from Creative, which he
evaluates as being of a sufficiently high standard to be included
in the ALSA driver package and the Linux kernel. Not being a proud
X-Fi owner, however, he has been unable to test the snd-ctxfi
driver himself and has therefore called on users who do own an X-Fi
card to give the driver a whirl -- and over the last few days
several users have indeed done so, providing plenty of
feedback.
"The odds look good that the new driver will find its way into
the next version of ALSA and into version 2.6.31 of the Linux
kernel. This should be the end of a long odyssey for X-Fi sound
card Linux drivers. Creative originally made repeated promises of a
proprietary driver, but never delivered. A preliminary version of
the driver was released in 2007, but it had so many rough edges as
to be more or less unusable. An open source driver for the more or
less obsolete Open Sound System (OSS) was released out of the blue
in early 2008, and there were also reports that Creative planned to
provide open source developers with documentation for their sound
chips. This was followed by another long silence, before Creative
finally released their own open source driver in November. However
this driver again proved to be a little too rough and ready and was
taken up by only a small number of distributions. The snd-ctxfi
driver should be spared this fate, since its merger into the kernel
will see it included in most new distributions."
