Thank you, Darren.
If it becomes an issue, we can look into providing (or the community can
provide) a driver for ess1370, which I believe is at least one
alternative for qemu. (It would be easy enough to do this, actually.
The driver is already available in 4Front's OSS distribution.)
For sbpro itself, distributions may have issues. The source code is not
open, and I'm not entirely sure whether the binary is redistributable or
not.
For us, keeping the old sbpro driver around really isn't an option for
the future. For one, we simply lack the ability to test it with
anything other than virtualized hardware.
-- Garrett
Darren J Moffat wrote:
> I don't think qemu, even if though there is an opensolaris.org hosted
> project to ensure it runs on OpenSolaris, should hold up removal of
> this driver.
>
> Think about it this way, given all the OpenSolaris on metal and all
> the other whole machine virtualisation solutions that are available
> how important it is that qemu have sound ? Removal of this driver
> isn't going to break qemu support for Solaris as a guest it just means
> that qemu OpenSolaris guests after this putback won't have sound support.
>
> Is that really such a big deal ?
>
> From an architecture view I think this case is well researched and on
> solid ground. The qemu sound issue if it is really that important is
> a business choice not an ARC one and the value of keeping around such
> an old ISA driver would need to be justified to the Solaris PAC.
>
> Distributions other than the binary OpenSolaris and Sun's distros are
> free to hold on to this legacy driver and its support if they really
> wish to.
>
> In my opinion this case remains closed.
>
> --
> Darren J Moffat
