El Blog de Pacho

Sound Bug Week

The week from Monday/June/01 to Sunday/June/07 will be taken for solving sound bugs related with unproper model being used for sound drivers causing your hardware to be not properly supported.


How to participate

We need people reporting their sound issues (like sound not working at all, not being able to use headphones neither record from mic...) to provide some useful information that could be used for fixing bugs in future Kernel releases:

Information always required:
"uname -a"
"lspcidrake -v | fgrep -i AUDIO"
"cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#0 | fgrep -i CODEC " (numbers can be different than "0")

Please note that this BugWeek only covers bugs related with latest kernel from updates available for 2009.1 and latest cooker.

When sending bug report FOR THIS BUGWEEK you have to:
- NOT enter anything in "RPM Package" field, this way, you bug will be autoassigned to Triage Team allowing us to properly triage it for getting as much information as possible
- You can optionally add "BW-20090601" to "Whiteboard", otherwise, we will add it when appropiate.
- Use English for sending it, if you are not able to write it in english, please ask for help to your Mandriva community( http://forum.mandriva.com/ ).

Also it's important that you search in internet for any interesting information that could help (including links and, of course, patches if possible) to solve your bug report. If you have tried any other linux distribution and it works ok for your sound card, please report it also.
Some interesting links are:
http://www.mail-archive.com/alsa-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/
https://bugzilla.novell.com/
...

And, of course, at first search a bit in our bugtracker for checking if nobody else has already reported your same problem:
https://qa.mandriva.com/

If you already opened a bug with some related problem (with 2009.1 or Cooker) and want to get my attention on it, please add my bugzilla address (pacho at condmat1 dot ciencias dot uniovi dot es) to bug CC list and post a comment saying that you would want to get your bug in BugWeek. You can also mail me directly or simply comment in my blog post about this topic ( http://my.opera.com/pacho/blog/index.dml/tag/mandriva ) for any errors or suggestions about this BugWeek.

Steps to follow:
1. At first, try disabling Pulseaudio for preventing any "conflicts" it could cause. You can disable it from "draksound" (http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Draksound) (please remember to reenable pulseaudio when finishing).
If sound works after that, maybe the problem is caused by pulseaudio. In this case, login as a USER (not root) and run "pulseaudio -k", then run "pulseaudio -vvv" and keep the terminal open. The debug info will flow as you use pulseaudio clients. Please open a bug report providing this information.

2. If you still have problems you have to check volume levels. Run "reset_sound" for getting Mandriva volume defaults for your sound card, then run "cp /etc/asound.state /tmp/asound.state.1". Now, run "alsamixer" and set volume levels that make sound work for you (if it doesn't change anything, skip to next point). After that, run "alsactl store" and "diff -u /tmp/asound.state.1 /etc/asound.state > /tmp/state.diff". Finally, attach /tmp/state.diff

3. If it is still failing, we need to know what possible "model=" option could help us to get your hardware working. If you are using "snd-hda-intel" driver please visit:
http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sound/alsa/HD-Audio-Models.txt
and search for your codec, for example, search for "STAC9220". You will see something like:
STAC9220/9221
=============
ref Reference board
3stack D945 3stack
5stack D945 5stack + SPDIF
intel-mac-v1 Intel Mac Type 1
...
dell-m82 Dell XPS M1210

These (3stack, 5stack...) are the possible values you can try for getting sound working

If you are using any other driver, please visit:
http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/sound/alsa/ALSA-Configuration.txt
and search for your driver, for example "snd-ice1712". You will get:
Module snd-ice1712
------------------

Module for Envy24 (ICE1712) based PCI sound cards.
* MidiMan M Audio Delta 1010
...
* Terrasoniq TS 88

model - Use the given board model, one of the following:
delta1010, dio2496, delta66, delta44, audiophile, delta410,
delta1010lt, vx442, ewx2496, ews88mt, ews88mt_new, ews88d,
dmx6fire, dsp24, dsp24_value, dsp24_71, ez8,
phase88, mediastation
...

And you will see what possible "model" values you can try for your card.

4. For trying them please run:
service alsa force-stop
modprobe snd-hda-intel model=xxxx (your chosen model)
reset_sound

5. If some model value works, please report the proper one needed for your card. If none works for you, simply report that no current available model works for you :-), and the same if it solves the issue "partially".

6. Finally, you will need to attach (please click on "Add an attachment" button in bug report) the output of alsa-debug.sh script, simply run:
wget "www.alsa-project.org/alsa-info.sh" -O alsa-info.sh
sh alsa-info.sh --no-upload (press "Yes" on first screen and "OK" on last one)

Now, simply attach /tmp/alsa-info.txt file to bug report.

NOTE to Mandriva User Groups

I would highly appreciate if you could translate this to yous native language and spread this in your local community. Thanks a lot.