Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support

Re:Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support by stackghost on Friday April 24, 2026 @12:39PM (#47892587)

Sound Blasters and compatible cards used IRQ lines because back in the bad old days CPUs were slow, bandwidth was tiny, and buffers were minuscule.

To get responsive/real time audio the card needs to signal to the CPU, not the other way around, and at the time IRQs were the way to do that on ISA busses.

I would imagine that ISA cards that didn't need IRQs either required CPU polling or DMA.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Linux 7.1 Removes Drivers for Bus Mouse Support by M95D on Friday April 24, 2026 @03:33PM (#47894772)

I imagined that the game / audio driver would just send data to the card at regular intervals and that's it. I realize now that the card uses it's own clock that can drift when compared to the system timer and this method would have a buffer underrun/overrun problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]