Recent blog entries for rsousa

Via 82cxxx
I've been hacking the via kernel sound driver over the last week. Now mmap() is working (QuakeX!) and the driver supports variable sized fragments and number of fragments. The problems with RealPlayer should also be fixed. Jeff Garzik should submit these changes to be included in the 2.4.1 kernel. The alsa driver also needs some (minor) fixing but free time is rather limited...

Emu10k1
The emu10k1 driver has been pretty much in a stand still. My computer is still in the US which takes all the fun of working on a driver you don't have the hardware for.

It's three weeks now I'm in France working at Sophia- Antipolis for Conexant. Things are starting to settle down and I hope I will restart coding for the emu10k1 project soon. For now I just try to keep up to date and follow the mailing list.

Not much work done today, but then again it's only 4 am ;-)

Movie of the Day
Lars von Trier "Dancer in the Dark" starring Bjork and Catherine Deneuve. A very strong movie in it's beauty and sadness. Not your every day musical. A definite must see, but be prepared to be moved.

Emu10k1
More people are complaining about no support for their soundcards. These share a common jack for analog/digital output and seem to be common in gateway machines. Analog works ok and by default but digital output needs some black magic to work. Hopefully Creative will provide some info...

Leisure
Finally saw Emir Kusturica "UnderGround". Very good, better than "Black Cat, White Cat" I saw last week, which was already quite good.

Emu10k1
Haven't been working much but the emu10k1 mixer GUI has progressed a bit. I'm starting to get more confortable with GTK, which helps, but it is still ugly as hell. The artist in me is long dead.

As for the driver, implemented mmap() of the record buffer and done some bug fixing and cleanup. Also took the time to learn a bit more about linux memory management and memory maping.

I'm considering doing a rewrite of the sound driver just to see if I can reduce the amount of locking that is currently needed. The idea was inspired mainly by the sound drivers written by Jeff Garzik (which have little to no locking). This will probably remain as a private project until I can proof it is worth it (probably never). What I need to find is a way to measure the driver performance quantitatively.

Work
I've have accepted the job in France (near Nice) and will start on the 13th November. I'll be working in Conexant Inc. developing linux drivers for their hardware. More details later.

Fun
Went to see an Apocalyptica concert. For those who don't know them they are a Finish group composed of four cello players, they are also a heavy metal band, doing covers of groups like Metallica, Sepultura and Slayer besides their original compositions. I'm not a big heavy metal fan but this concert was excellent. Have to get their latest album.

Made my introduction to GTK. The emu10k1 was needing a mixer GUI and no one else was coming forward so I went ahead. Suddenly there are four other persons willing to help.

GTK gurus: How the hell does one free a box with box insides, with boxes inside... without storing a pointer for each of them? Documentation is a bit sparse.

Skipped another kickboxing training... not good. It has been 2 weeks since the last one. Fat accumulates...

On the job hunting front I'm still waiting for the people from Denmark to get back to me, the original plan was for me to visit them for a day or two. The other proposition (France) is quite good except for the salary :), but since I still need to sort out some details things might be better than what they seem.

Ok, so every body is complaining about the new driver design. It's true I broke compatibility with some user space utilities but my intentions are good :). I'm now working on better support for changing control gprs, changing patches names and add proper locking to the whole thing. The last item is a problem since the dsp code only makes sense as a whole but I allow it to be modified piece by piece... For your safety use only approved tools!!

On the positive side Jeff Garzik wrote me a "thank you" e-mail regarding my oss-test utility. Nice :)

The trip to France went Ok. There were some flight delays (coming and going) and I ended up staying only about 4 hours in France but the interview went Ok. Interesting to learn how a big company sees linux, patents, IP, open source, ... Not all good, of course, but I'm optimistic (yes, I'm a sell out :)

My first diary entry!

Still working on the dsp program manager for the emu10k1. After some re-writing (should be finished tonight) of the io gprs handling it should be possible to start working on new features.

I'm now oficially job hunting. I'll be flying to France on Thursday for a job interview...