Intel Is Having Great Success With Their Open-Source Sound Firmware

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Is Having Great Success With Their Open-Source Sound Firmware

Intel a while back open-sourced their sound firmware and SDK and also launched the "Sound Open Firmware" project in cooperation with the Linux Foundation. It's been an interesting journey and getting Intel pointed towards offering more open-source firmware...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Sound-Open-Firmware-Intel-OSFC

[rmoog]

Great news! Sound is very, very overlooked.

[uid313]

Cool!

Now if they could only do the same for their CPU/GPU.
But the Intel CPU have much weird, secret, blackbox stuff like Intel Management Engine (ME), BSP (board support package), FSP (firmware support package), TPM, co-processor, etc.

[GI_Jack]

Excellent. This should result in higher quality operating system drivers, as kernel teams should have a better idea of what the hardware/firmware is doing. Because of licensing, it will aid patching, distribution, and more systems will get high quality sound. Simple, overlooked, but it will help keep things like voice comms and music running smoothly.

[dwagner]

Great to hear about their successful open-sourcing of audio drivers - but what still spooks me is the weird high frequency at which "new", audio hardware is being released without any apparent reason. It's almost like main-board manufacturers insist on a "+1" increment for some audio chip model number for every new board. When you read through the specs, nothing significant changed.