sv(4)

sv4

S3 sonicvibes audio device

Usage

sv* at pci? audio* at sv?

Overview

The sv driver provides support for S3 SonicVibes (S3-617) chipset-based cards. Disabling the SRS 3-D spatial feature of the chip is recommended for higher quality audio. This can be done in software by issuing the following command:

$ mixerctl outputs.spatial=off

Releases

58 releases since OpenBSD 2.4; the text changed 10 times.

  1. 2.4–2.5
  2. 2.6
  3. 2.7
  4. 2.8–2.9
  5. 3.0–3.1
  6. 3.2–3.6
  7. 3.7–3.8
  8. 3.9
  9. 4.0–4.1
  10. 4.2–4.6
  11. 4.7–8.0

History

This driver is based on the eap(4) driver by Lennart Augustsson. The sv device driver first appeared in OpenBSD 2.6.

Bugs

The "FM" DAC, wavetable synth, and MIDI port are not supported. Recording at a rate different from playback is supported by the chip but not the driver. The mixer does not allow control of reverb, digital loopback, or 3-D SRS features. The chip does not support exact record speeds (it seems) of 11025Hz, 22050Hz, and so on, used by Windows audio. Usually, the actual record is rate is around +/- 50Hz of the specified.

From man 8.0-current-20261101 in OpenBSD 8.0-current (2026-11-01). Parsed by carta from the page's mdoc source.