07 November 2008, 11:38

Creative release GPL X-Fi drivers

Creative have released a GPL licensed driver for their Sound Blaster X-Fi cards under Linux after a number of attempts at releasing a binary only driver failed. The new driver is not, according to its developers, ready for production use. The driver supports ALSA PCM playback, recording and mixing, but not external I/O modules. Creative's earlier binary driver met with disappointment as users found it only ran on 64-bit systems and had a range of technical issues.

According to reports, the new GPL driver is giving mixed results for users who have installed it. The new driver, named The Creative XFiDrv 1.0, is around 13,000 lines of code and licensed under the GPLv2. Phoronix have detailed the history of Creative's driver development and have examined the code, noting that there are definite signs of active development within the code and look forward to the rapid incorporation and development of the driver within the Linux community.

(djwm)

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