Alsa's 32bit userland ioctl -> 64bit kernelmode mapping module, snd-ioctl32, has been broken for a long time. Though, there were recent efforts that finally got it working. I've been using alsa for about 2 months on my Sun Ultra 10 and had no problems at all. The only issue is the still badly implemented DMA timing (or so they say) which can cause loud noise and distortions with the onboard CS4231 if system load is high. I have also tried a SoundBlaster Audigy ES, but except for the mixer, nothing worked. dmesg said something about a PCI IRQ error. It is important to note that kernel 2.4 has some very bad behaviour on Suns (like lacking keyboard translation, broken USB support and other things) which 2.6 doesn't have. So I suggest gentoo-sparc users start switching over to 2.6 and alsa. This means some maintainer should remove all of the alsa-related package masks from the sparc profiles and inform the sparc users they have to load snd-ioctl32 to get sound working with kernel 2.6. There's still a lot of work to do on the drivers, but for most tasks, they're already very usable (listening to mp3s, watching videos, ...).
Back to normal priority, alsa is no blocker. 2.6 isn't quite stable on every sparc box around quite yet. We know 2.4 has it's issues, but it's stable under normal circumstances compared to 2.6.
Alsa is unmasked in the 2006.0 profile. But before going upgrade happy read http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-419845.html The stability problems still apply for Ultra 1 & 2 machines at least, and may affect others too so don't go jumping around saying 2.6 is ready for sparc, that's the reason a 2006.0/2.4 profile also exists.
*** Bug 119651 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Alsa still seems to be masked in 2006.0 from what I can see (synced this morning)
gustavoz@ayanami ~ $ grep alsa /usr/portage/profiles/default-linux/sparc/sparc64/2006.0/use.mask -alsa It's not, and it's been that way since oh.. december... If you mean the 2.4 profiles and/or sparc32, then yeah, alsa isn't supported there.
I mean sparc32. Could I have a profile for sparc32 with alsa unmasked? It works, and with the latest gentoo-sources there's no alternative.
See? Info good, give info next time :-) Weeve: can you test it on one of your sparc32 boxes?
Sorry. I'm lost since there's no longer a separate box for it when reporting.
Usually a nice emerge --info will have sufficient information for us to know.
I know. There used to be a separate box saying 'please paste all output from "emerge info" here' on the report a bug page. Anyway, here it is: sparc ~ # emerge info Portage 2.0.53 (default-linux/sparc/sparc32/2006.0, gcc-3.3.5-20050130, glibc-2.3.3.20040420-r2, 2.6.15-gentoo-r1-mikeyd sparc) ================================================================= System uname: 2.6.15-gentoo-r1-mikeyd sparc sun4m Gentoo Base System version 1.6.14 distcc 2.18.3 sparc-unknown-linux-gnu (protocols 1 and 2) (default port 3632) [disabled] dev-lang/python: 2.3.5, 2.4.2 sys-apps/sandbox: 1.2.11 sys-devel/autoconf: 2.13, 2.59-r6 sys-devel/automake: 1.4_p6, 1.5, 1.6.3, 1.7.9-r1, 1.8.5-r3, 1.9.6-r1 sys-devel/binutils: 2.16.1 sys-devel/libtool: 1.5.20 virtual/os-headers: 2.4.23 ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="sparc" AUTOCLEAN="yes" CBUILD="sparc-unknown-linux-gnu" CFLAGS="-O2 -mcpu=supersparc -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe" CHOST="sparc-unknown-linux-gnu" CONFIG_PROTECT="/etc /usr/kde/2/share/config /usr/kde/3/share/config /usr/share/config /var/qmail/control" CONFIG_PROTECT_MASK="/etc/gconf /etc/terminfo /etc/env.d" CXXFLAGS="-O2 -mcpu=supersparc -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe" DISTDIR="/usr/portage/distfiles" FEATURES="autoconfig distlocks sandbox sfperms strict" GENTOO_MIRRORS="http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.ibiblio.org/gentoo/ ftp://ftp.mirrorservice.org/sites/www.ibiblio.org/gentoo/ " MAKEOPTS="-j7" PKGDIR="/usr/portage/packages" PORTAGE_TMPDIR="/var/tmp" PORTDIR="/usr/portage" PORTDIR_OVERLAY="/usr/local/portage" SYNC="rsync://rsync.europe.gentoo.org/gentoo-portage" USE="sparc X Xaw3d acl apache2 bash-completion berkdb bitmap-fonts bzip2 caps crypt cups dlloader dmx doc expat fbcon flac foomaticdb fortran gcj gdbm gif gpm gstreamer gtk gtk2 imlib jpeg libwww mad motif ncurses nls objc pam pcre perl png python readline samba spell ssl symlink tcpd threads tiff toolbar truetype truetype-fonts type1-fonts udev unicode vim-with-x xml2 xprint xv zlib userland_GNU kernel_linux elibc_glibc" Unset: ASFLAGS, CTARGET, LANG, LC_ALL, LDFLAGS, LINGUAS I'm mostly sparc but using ~sparc in package.keywords for gentoo-sources and alsa-*.
... (6 years later) .... In the testing that I've done, while I can unmask alsa keywords for sparc32 and applications appear to build OK, I cannot generate comprehendable sound out of the one SPARCStation 20 I've tried. Do you actually get understandable sound?
Bearing in mind the machine in question is currently pending hard drive replacement: Yes, fine to my ears. The machine I've tried can't decode an mp3/ogg/flac in real time (horrible distortions if you try that), but aplay foo.wav works beautifully, and doing decoding on another machine and then sending sound to it via nas is perfectly usable. The SS10 I'm using uses the DBRI driver.
Concerning decoding MP3 compressed data, I've noticed something very odd: On a Pentium I PC with 100MHz it takes up almost the complete CPU, while on my Ultra 10/333MHz, I barely notice any change in usage (about 1-2%). Is that just a mismeasurement or did someone add voodoo to mpg123/sparc?
sparc32 isn't supported any more - there's no 2007.0 sparc32 profile either.
