Help fix driver for YMF-744B on Toshiba Tecra 8100?

Help fix driver for YMF-744B on Toshiba Tecra 8100?

[Mihai T. Lazarescu]

Hello developers,

I would like to try to fix the long standing bug of the ALSA
driver for the Toshiba Tecra 8100 YMF-744B card.

My experiences until now led, in the best of the cases,
to sound with cracks and distortions, no matter the mixer
settings (mostly if at boot time the OSS drivers are loaded,
then rmmod them and insmod ALSA).  In the worst, only high
pitch whistles with some cracks here and there (mostly if ALSA
is loaded directly at boot).

I am quite familiar with C, but not with ALSA internals.
I'd like to try and debug this if someone is willing to direct
me to what to look for.

Thanks in advance!

Mihai


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Re: Help fix driver for YMF-744B on Toshiba Tecra 8100?

[Roger E Critchlow Jr]

As I mentioned back in December, I can get the alsa driver to
work on my Tecra 8100 by reloading the alsa driver until it
works.  This takes somewhere between 0 and 20 reloads.  Mihai
has confirmed this behavior on his machine and also noted that
the sound functional/nonfunctional state persists through a
suspend/resume cycle.

I've combined the reloading process with two different state
scans to see if I could detect what is different between the
working and non-working states of the ymfpci driver.

The first state was the output of /sbin/lspci -vvxxxs 00:0c.0,
and the second state was a concatenation of the file contents
of every file found under /proc/asound/card0.

In each case, I looped through 10 reloads of alsa, found the
exact same machine state after each reload, but some of the
reloaded states produced functional sound while others produced
noise.

Is there any other state information that I might look at to
determine why an Alsa driver doesn't appear to be behaving
deterministically?

-- rec --

Mihai T. Lazarescu wrote:

>Hello developers,
>
>I would like to try to fix the long standing bug of the ALSA
>driver for the Toshiba Tecra 8100 YMF-744B card.
>
>My experiences until now led, in the best of the cases,
>to sound with cracks and distortions, no matter the mixer
>settings (mostly if at boot time the OSS drivers are loaded,
>then rmmod them and insmod ALSA).  In the worst, only high
>pitch whistles with some cracks here and there (mostly if ALSA
>is loaded directly at boot).
>
>I am quite familiar with C, but not with ALSA internals.
>I'd like to try and debug this if someone is willing to direct
>me to what to look for.
>
>Thanks in advance!
>
>Mihai
>  
>



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Re: Help fix driver for YMF-744B on Toshiba Tecra 8100?

[tom burkart]

On Feb 19, Roger E Critchlow Jr wrote:

> In each case, I looped through 10 reloads of alsa, found the
> exact same machine state after each reload, but some of the
> reloaded states produced functional sound while others produced
> noise.
When I load the toshiba kernel module, then the alsa driver, set the mixer
settings, then I have sound most of the time (under an old version of
gnome).
The other option is to unload alsa and load the ymfpci module (kernel/oss)
and there is sound (guaranteed every time).

My intention was to compare the low level code of the kernel oss driver
with the alsa driver and see what they do differently.
My initial guess is that the initialisation is done slightly
differently...
Alas, I haven't had the chance to do so... (yet).

tom.
Consultant

AUSSEC    Phone: 61 4 1768 2202
339 Blaxland Rd., Ryde NSW 2112
Email: tom@aussec.com


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Re: Help fix driver for YMF-744B on Toshiba Tecra 8100?

[Mihai T. Lazarescu]

On Fri, 20 Feb 2004, tom burkart wrote:

> When I load the toshiba kernel module, then the alsa driver, set the mixer
> settings, then I have sound most of the time (under an old version of
> gnome).

Strange, I have the toshiba kernel module loaded at boot time
and when I start ALSA by hand I get mostly non-functional sound.

> The other option is to unload alsa and load the ymfpci module (kernel/oss)
> and there is sound (guaranteed every time).

xine playback is better with ALSA (synchronization) and OSS
is becoming obsolete in 2.6 kernels... :)

> My intention was to compare the low level code of the kernel oss driver
> with the alsa driver and see what they do differently.
> My initial guess is that the initialisation is done slightly
> differently...

I used to use ALSA 0.5 series without a glitch years ago on
RH6.2-7.2 (maybe even 7.3, until OSS ymfpci came out).

My intention is to compare 0.5 series inits with current
version, since I suspect they should be easier to compare than
OSS and ALSA... :)

> Alas, I haven't had the chance to do so... (yet).

Can't guess when I'll have a chance myself, but don't loosing
faith. ;)

Cheers,

Mihai


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