ForteMedia FM801 Linux driver

Please note that OSS Lite and consequently the forte driver has been deprecated in Linux 2.6. Use ALSA's fm801!

Current stable release and in the kernel as of 2.4.23-pre5 is 1.65.

2.4.21 and 2.4.22 users should apply [ 1.63 to 1.65 diff ]

Read the ChangeLog.

Download older forte patches.

The forte driver has been included in the official Linux kernel since 2.4.20-pre6.

forte is a Linux OSS Lite driver for cards using the FortéMedia FM801 audio controller. The Genius Sound Maker Live card and the onboard audio in HP Workstation zx2000 have been tested.

Both IA-32 and IA-64 architectures are supported, but the driver should work on any platform.

The FM801 controller supports a variety of AC'97 codecs. This driver lets the OSS core code figure the codec out, and should thus support any codec with support in the Linux kernel.

The driver supports /dev/mixer and /dev/dsp for generic OSS audio interfaces. In general it adheres to the OSS spec to the extent it can be done with the way the hardware works. The FM801 controller doesn't support scatter-gather, so if the application sets fragment size too low, it puts strict requirements on interrupt processing speed. The driver tries to compensate by enforcing bigger buffers than requested by the application if the fragment size is low.

The forte driver includes both standard read()/write() and the unsupported mmap() interface used by Quake. mmap() is only supported in playback mode.

U8 and S16 audio formats are supported, mono/stereo, as well as all sample rates implemented by the chip.

MIDI, FM audio, and the gameport controller are not currently supported.

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