Has anyone used the Sound Blaster X-Fi driver from Creative Labs? The driver was full of bugs and was always a step behind the Windows releases. Other open source drivers with support for the Creative X-Fi were also stagnant in development.

Finally, Creative saw it was going nowhere with this policy and open-sourced this driver’s code. The code is available under the GNU GPLv2 License now.

The first X-Fi driver for Linux was released in September 2007 but was for 64 bit only. No 32 bit driver came out for a long time after that. This April saw another beta release which comes almost after a year and a half. With the code being open-sourced, we now expect to see a more regular release cycle. The driver is 13,000 lines in size and has a big limitation of external I/O modules. The driver is capable of ALSA PCM playback, ALSA recording and mixing.

The Linux version of the X-Fi driver has been named Creative XFiDrv 1.00. Though, far from perfect this time as well ( The driver causes a problem in the Fedora 9 Kernel) , the driver is open to open-source developers which comes as a big relief.