Re: [regression] 2.6.25-rc4 snd-es18xx broken on Alpha

From: Rene Herman
Date: Mon Mar 10 2008 - 12:57:02 EST


On 10-03-08 17:21, Bob Tracy wrote:

Rene Herman wrote:

Bob Tracy wrote:
Supposedly with the ES1888, dma1 is for capture, dma2 is for playback. dma2 == 5 is a 16-bit channel, yes? That could explain much...
It is, but what would it explain? You're only having playback problems, right?

dma2 is for playback, I'm having playback problems, dma2 == 5 is a
a 16-bit channel, and 16-bit DMA is an issue with the es18xx driver
(according to the comment near the top of the file).

Yes, never mind, misread.

Can it be forced to use dma2=0 (an 8-bit channel, and the usual capture channel on es18xx)? However, that might not be the issue anyway:

I'll try a few things like dma2 == dma1, and setting dma2 to an 8-bit
channel, but I think the various configuration parameters are hard-wired
on the Alpha (not PnP).

Settable through BIOS perhaps? But anyways, if it used to work, it should work and I really suspect it's just a matter of a broken OSS emulation on alpha anyways. In fact, I fairly distinctly remember this being an issue not too long ago but google is coming up empty...

Takashi? Wasn't there an OSS emulation on Alpha thing a while ago?

This sounds very suspiciously like a difference with playing through the native ALSA interface and the OSS emulaion. Could you and/or Bob confirm that sox is using the OSS emulation and not ALSA natively?

I could very well imagine the ALSA OSS emulation being broken on Alpha. I doubt any of teh developers has an Alpha. And if aplay works correctly this seems very likely.

I'll see if I can verify whether it's a native ALSA vs. OSS emulation
issue.

The local version of sox (Debian 12.7.9-1) contains a library dependency
on libasound.so.2, and a "strings" on the binary yields "ALSA_0.9.0rc4"
as well as several ALSA error message strings. However, output by
default goes to /dev/dsp (major 14, minor 3), which is definitely OSS.

That's an expected string and very likely doesn't mean you have a 0.9.0-rc4 alsa-lib installed. "strings [ ... ] | grep ^ALSA_" probably shows a few later versions as well. But if the problem's the (kernel) OSS emulation then userspace dopesn't matter anyway.

You seem to have sox installed, so try

$ sox foo.wav -t alsa default

and

$ sox foo.wav -t ossdsp /dev/dsp

to have it play through the ALSA and OSS interfaces, respectively.

Rene.
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