NVidia AC97 / CK804: arecord hangs in system call poll()

[Rainer Menzner <rmenzner@L1id.com>]

Hi,

my soundcard is an onboard AC97 CK804 NVidia. I use snd-intel8x0 module. 
Everything works fine except recording sound. When calling

   arecord -f cd buffer.wav

the program infinitely hangs, and an strace shows that it is a poll() 
call that does not return. After interrupting, a wave file of 44 bytes 
which is the header only is left. My setup is Kernel 2.6.21.3, all 
ALSA-software is updated to the latest version, that is 1.0.14(a).

In a previous setup with an older ALSA version and kernel 2.6.16.11 
recording did work with the same hardware. Now that I updated all ALSA 
software, even with that older kernel version the same recording problem 
came up. From that I concluded that it is somehow related to the 
ALSA-lib version. I have tried to downgrade ALSA-lib down to 1.0.0 to no 
avail.

I have also made tests appropriate if this would be an interrupt problem 
(using pci=noroute et al) which also did not solve the problem.

I have scrolled though the archives of alsa-user and there have been a 
few posts regarding the same problem (but with other chip sets). 
However, in those threads no definitive solution of the problem has been 
discussed. So I tried it again in alsa-user but did not get any feedback ...

Now, I finally try this developer list. Your comments and help are much 
appreciated. Let me know if you need further info. I'm not a Linux 
system programmer or specialist, but I would be willing to do some 
debugging if somebody explains what to check.

Thanks for any support,

-Rainer