You guys need to mask all the Alsa 0.5 stuff and also plugins that use it. Such as xmms-alsa. People are screwing up their alsa installs left and right and I'm in the #gentoo channel helping 5-6 people a day rebuild their Alsa installs after accidently installing some Alsa-0.5 stuff. Alsa-0.9 is now a recommendation by the Alsa-Project and they're no longer supporting 0.5 so I say it's time for Gentoo to catch up to that.
The ALSA 0.9 intel-8x0 driver is fuxx0red, so everybody with a recent chipset (and no separate sound card) is screwed. It is in fact so screwed that modprobe segfaults and initialisation never finishes. No kernel oops nor freeze, fortunately.
I've recently updated world to find that my sound no longer works. I also have the Intel8x0 sound card. I have found that modprobe works fine and even loads the correctly at boot. However nothing can acess the sound. Here is what I get when I try to start the sound driver: aplay /usr/kde/2/share/sounds/pop.wav ALSA lib conf.c:1520:(snd_config_load1) _toplevel_:6:8:Unexpected char ALSA lib conf.c:2616:(snd_config_hook_load) /etc/asound.conf may be old or corrupted: consider to remove or fix it ALSA lib conf.c:2463:(snd_config_hooks_call) function snd_config_hook_load returned error: Unknown error ALSA lib conf.c:2859:(snd_config_update_r) hooks failed, removing configuration aplay: main:447: audio open error: Unknown error So far nothing has been touched after the update world. No other ill effects result from the sound not working so at least thats good.
It'd be a bit more helpful if you guys said what sound cards you have or what build-in sound chipsets you have so we can track down the problem.
Just something that came to mind after I posted the previous one... If you have a VIA chipset then possibly the correct driver is via686a even though intel8x0 worked before or was recommended to you. Both drivers use the AC97 codec and both chips are based off the AC97 codec. Just a suggestion.
Thanks for the suggestion but I am using an Intel chipset. Here is the pci info from proc: Bus 0, device 31, function 5: Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82820 820 (Camino 2) Chipset AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 18). IRQ 10. I/O at 0xa800 [0xa8ff]. I/O at 0xa400 [0xa43f]
Is this still an issue with the new releases of Alsa?
Closing for the lack of feedback.