No Documentation for es137x driver

[Danny Pansters]

On Saturday 13 March 2004 09:28, Loren M. Lang wrote:
> I have recent tried installing a Creative Ensoniq ES1371 AudioPCI sound
> card in FreeBSD, but I ran into trouble trying to find the right driver.
> I first tried loading the sbc driver and it loaded without any errors,
> but no kernel messages were generated and no /dev/dsp was created.  I
> assumed it was the right driver since, according to apropos, it was the
> only driver with creative in the man page and it did support certain
> versions of ensoniq sound cards.  Also, the box claims it's sound
> blaster compatible, but nothing happened.
>
> Looking at the man page for pcm, it claims that it supports a pci es1371
> and that driver was automatically loaded as a dependency of sbc, but it
> still didn't detect the card.  Eventually I looked through the kernel
> source and found a pci driver called es137x.  I used kldload to load
> snd_es137x and now dmesg claims it has sound detected and sound works fine.
> My question is why this is not documented anywhere, no man page for the
> driver and the hardware compatibility guide for 4.9 and 5.2.1 both claim
> it's supported, but don't mention that driver.  I'm using FreeBSD 5.2.1

sbc is for old (ISA) cards such as AWE32/64. I think it even requires some 
plug-n-play. Most of the "simple" newer Soundblaster PCI cards are nothing 
else then ensoniqs (es137x), I had one of these. The newer SB Live series 
have their own driver (emu10k1), I have one of these now. 

IIRC, CreativeLabs acquired the Ensoniq company at the time (must have been 
1998ish or thereabout) and didn't have any PCI offerings of their own so they 
just rebranded what they had bought into "SB PCI".

Normally you would just load the pcm "metadriver" and it will figure out it's 
an ensoniq and then load the es137x module automagically. You can either load 
the correct module directly or let the pcm module figure out which one it 
needs. So in short, with sbc you were using the wrong "low level" driver.

In my /boot/loader.conf (5.2-current box) I simply have: snd_emu10k1_load=YES 
but might as well have snd_pcm_load=YES instead.

If interested, usually you can get some more info on supported hardware by 
looking at the drivers' header files. Sometimes this is about the only 
documentation there is (for example with frame grabber cards).

HTH,

Dan