"After several years of waiting and plenty of bug-fixes, the ALSA project (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) has hit full release status and is set to replace the now long-in-the-tooth OSS drivers. With the ALSA drivers comes a wave of new features, the most noteworthy being surround sound. I caught up with two of the guys, Patrick Shirkey and Takashi Iwai for a bit of a chat...
"With ALSA being used by the new 2.6 kernel, what becomes of the old OSS drivers?
"PS: If I understand correctly, they will included in the new kernels as legacy for some time yet but they will be marked as deprecated.
"TI: They will be there although many drivers will be unmaintained. In the long term, they might disappear from the kernel tree, but it won't happen during 2.6.x kernel, at least. Also, for me as an ALSA developer, it's even better to have the reference driver to compare with (especially for the old ISA chips)..."
