What happens to nforce sound support? Are we stuck with the crappy intel_8x0???

[jocko]

I've seen this question being asked a hundred times, but there has never been a proper answer. Now that nvidia seem to have quit developing the old nvsound driver, will they at least release the needed information to the alsa or kernel developers so that we can get working sound (with HARDWARE mixing and surround output) with the newer kernels?
I've seen a lot of complaints about the nvsound module, but in my experience it works perfectly, with hardware mixing, dolby digital output and even AC3 passthrough (my mobo have the soundstorm chipset).
It seems to be impossible to get intel_8x0 to do hardware mixing, and it takes a LOT of trial and error to get software mixing to work at all.
Are there any reasons not to release the specs to the open source community?
Could we at least get a straight answer, so that we know it's time to by a new sound card?

[jocko]

No answer?
Nevermind, at least I figured out it's possible to get the nvsound driver to build on kernel 2.6.17 (with some help of a few post in these forums). I posted a howto on ubuntuforums.org, for anyone that is interested.
It's written for ubuntu, but I imagine it's not too hard to get it to work on other distros.

[GotenXiao]

It seems fair that if they don't want to develop drivers for the chipsets, they should, at the very least, release documentation so the open source community can improve the current drivers. I'd love to have hardware mixing rather than software mixing, but the drivers are holding me back from that.