|
Sound advice
By E. Charles Plant
As development progresses on almost every front, Linux has proven an extremely versatile operating system, even if you overlook its virtues as a networking powerhouse. In the realm of hardware support, it's all about the drivers. I recently had the opportunity to interview Dev Mazumdar, president and CEO of 4Front Technologies, a leading company in sound hardware support for Linux.
open source IT: Welcome, Dev! Tell me about 4Front Technologies.
4Front: 4Front was formed by myself and [OpenSoundSystem designer] Hannu Savolainen in 1995.
open source IT: What do you do?
|
4Front Technologies |
|
What: Open Sound System, soundcard drivers for Linux.
Where: Culver City, CA, and at www.4front-tech.com.
Who: Dev Mazumdar, president and CEO; Hannu Savolainen, VP of engineering.
|
|
4Front: We had been both been working on sound drivers prior to
1995 - Hannu on Linux and myself on IBM's AIX. I am generally in charge of
business, sales, and tech support and Hannu is in charge of product development
and writing drivers. However, lately I've been doing device drivers as well
since there's just too much work involved.
open source IT: What product are you working on now?
4Front: Currently, we're working on the Aureal Vortex drivers. There's been a huge demand for these drivers. Prior to that, we'd been working on a contract from SCO to provide AudioPCI and other drivers for SCO UnixWare and Open Server.
open source IT: What's the hardest part of getting the job done?
4Front: Finding enough hours in a day to write software. We are only
two people handling development of the drivers - a lot of time is taken up
doing tech support and then a lot of our time is taken up in porting OSS to
other platforms like FreeBSD, Solaris, etc. That leaves us very little time
to do new development and write new drivers.
|
Alan Cox has been doing a tremendous job keeping OSS/Free up to date.
|
|
open source IT: How long until the Vortex drivers are finished?
4Front: We have the Vortex1 drivers working (although still in beta). We are working on the Vortex2 drivers and we expect a release hopefully before end of October.
open source IT: How often do you release open source code?
4Front: When we formed 4Front in 1995, Hannu was still maintaining
the OSS/Free kernel drivers and we used to put out a lot of code from our
commercial drivers into the OSS/Free product (under GPL). Finally the work
of maintaining two different source trees was just too much for one
person and Hannu elected to give up being the maintainer of OSS/Free.
Alan Cox graciously jumped in and he has been doing a tremendous job keeping OSS/Free up to date with the drivers for the latest sound cards. We have stopped making any more contributions to OSS/Free since now the only drivers that we have support for in the
commercial product are drivers that we develop under NDA.
open source IT: What's next after the Aureal Vortex drivers?
|
