[Consortium] FFADO 2.0 released

The FFADO team is proud and happy to announce the release of FFADO 2.0.0. As the release candidates have been around for almost one year now without a significant amount of bug reports we feel confident that the current code-base has matured. Around the end of november the 1000-th device was registered as being used with FFADO, which seemed to be a nice number to triggered the release. Furthermore on December 2 the Linux kernel version 2.6.32 has been released. This version fixes the new kernel FireWire drivers such that they are compatible with FFADO. So once the distributions pick up this kernel the old/new kernel stack confusion should be history. Thanks go out to the vendors that provided us with gear to support for the 2.0 release: Echo Digital Audio, Edirol, Ego Systems Inc, Focusrite, Mackie and Terratec. Kudos for their early-bird support! Special thanks also go to BridgeCo and TC Applied for providing us with their development platforms and for helping with vendor contacts. Their support makes that FFADO covers the most widely used platforms for FireWire audio and that we can quickly implement support for new devices. Looking ahead to the 2.1 release we can announce that we have implemented (basic) support for additional devices from Focusrite, Behringer, Stanton and TC Electronic. We plan to move to beta-testing 2.1 fairly soon as development on it has been ongoing for more than a year now. Additionally, work is being done on the RME devices, but its not yet known when that will be finished. Support for some other vendors is in the pipeline, so stay tuned for more announcements. A second major development is the move of the streaming infrastructure to kernel space. A kernel-space implementation will bring significant improvements with respect to reliability and efficiency. Furthermore it will allow to expose an ALSA interface, meaning that the scope of FireWire audio on Linux is extended significantly. Thanks to the Google Summer of Code and the Linux Foundation, work on this has been done during the summer. The code is not yet ready for use, but things are moving. More information can be found here: http://www.ffado.org/?q=release/2.0.0 For the eager, a direct download link: http://www.ffado.org/files/libffado-2.0.0.tar.gz On behalf of the FFADO team, Pieter Palmers