Hell Labs

Today at lunch boto handled me a QNX Neutrino 6.3.2 CD he was using in virtualization tests for Red Hat. I quickly installed it on a spare machine to see how well xmp would build on it — and it built quite well. After fixing some trivial build problems I examined the new sound system used in QNX6 (since the old drivers for QNX4 didn’t compile), and I was pleased to find that it’s based on the old ALSA 0.5 API. Xmp has an ALSA 0.5 driver written in 2000 by Tijs van Bakel and Rob Adamson, and it worked out of the box in Neutrino 6. Source patch and binary are available in the SF download page.

Next targets to test/port xmp include Plan9 (new port), BeOS and AIX (drivers exist, but never tested), and OS/2, IRIX, HP-UX and Solaris (used to work, but not tested for a long time). Contact me if you have access to one or more of those (or other) systems and have some free time to test the portability of an old mod player.

It is worth noting that my previous work with HDA fixing the 5.1 sound output of a couple of HP machines and the LG LW20 was made much easier with this very nice tool called codecgraph, which takes /proc/asound/cardX/codec#Y as input and generates a neat-looking graph using graphviz in such a way that you can see how mixers, amplifiers and pins are connected and visually follow the signal flow inside your HDA setup. I’ve even added some stuff to it — mostly new codec samples and other ancillary work since I’m illiterate in Python (yes, I know, I’ve tried but I just can’t like the language). You can clone my repository with git clone http://helllabs.org/git/codecgraph.git, or get the official tree from Boto’s repository. Codec sample contributions are welcome!

Update: Codecgraph project page published, with SVG renderings of all samples from our codec database.

Em cada episódio de Heroes que assisto, não consigo deixar de associar Peter Petrelli ao Leonardo Boiko. Principalmente pela personalidade, mas a aparência também ajuda.