Hi,
I think the original intention was to deprecate -soundhw altogether, and
only use -device in new configs. However that was problematic with some
special devices, like pcspk and maybe others that are created by the machine
and not user creatable.
Ah, right, the pcspk issue. Thanks for refreshing my memory.
'pcspk' is the by far most tricky one. The device is present
unconditionally, -soundhw pcspk only triggers the registration
with the audiodev backend.
'hda' creates two devices (intel-hda + hda-duplex), so it is an actual
shortcut compared to the longer -device version.
Every other device basically is pci_create_simple(...) or
isa_create_simple(...), even the names are identical, so "-soundhw sb16"
translates to "-device sb16" etc.
So deprecating -soundhw for everything but pcspk and hda is a
no-brainer, it isn't even a shortcut, '-device' is one character
shorter ;)
Question is what we do with hda + pcspk. I'm wondering whenever pcspk
is actually used in practice ...