ALSA Driver 1.0.22.1

ALSA Driver 1.0.22.1

[Darsen Lu]

I just installed alsa-drivers 1.0.22.1 (the latest version to my
understanding) on Ubuntu 9.10.

After that I started noticing conflicts between different sound-playback
applications.
For example, if I watch a Flash video on Firefox, stop it, and then start
playing an MP3 file on Totem (a Media Player), I don't hear any sound.
Once I close Firefox the music from Totem starts coming out.
This never happened before on my Linux system. I'd be very grateful if
someone could give me advices!


My /var/log/syslog shows the following whenever this happens:

Feb  7 02:42:36 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening
PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy
Feb  7 02:42:36 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: alsa-sink.c: Error opening
PCM device front:0: Device or resource busy


I also noticed the following message during bootup and was asked to report
this issue to ALSA Developers.

Feb  7 02:17:31 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: ratelimit.c: 179 events
suppressed
Feb  7 02:17:35 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: alsa-sink.c: ALSA woke us up
to write new data to the device, but there was actually nothing to write!
Feb  7 02:17:35 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: alsa-sink.c: Most likely
this is a bug in the ALSA driver 'snd_hda_intel'. Please report this issue
to the ALSA developers.
Feb  7 02:17:35 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: alsa-sink.c: We were woken
up with POLLOUT set -- however a subsequent snd_pcm_avail() returned 0 or
another value < min_avail.
Feb  7 02:17:36 darsen-laptop pulseaudio[1789]: ratelimit.c: 182 events
suppressed


The good news is my microphone started working with the newly-installed ALSA
drivers (It did not work with ALSA v1.0.20)


My Linux kernel version is 2.6.31-19.general.  I installed it using the
Ubuntu Package Manager.
On the other hand the ALSA driver was compiled from source code.  ALSA was
configured with the following options
           sudo ./configure -with-kernel=/usr/src/linux-headers-`uname -r`
--with-cards=hda-intel


"lspci -v" shows the following

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio
Controller (rev 03)
    Subsystem: Dell Device 02cf
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 31
    Memory at f6afc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
    Capabilities: <access denied>
    Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
    Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel


I confirmed that the correct version of driver was loaded into the kernel by
typing "cat /proc/asound/version":

Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.22.1.
Compiled on Feb  7 2010 for kernel 2.6.31-19-generic (SMP).

Thanks,
Darsen

Re: ALSA Driver 1.0.22.1

[Daniel Chen]

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 3:20 AM, Darsen Lu <darsenlu@gmail.com> wrote:
> After that I started noticing conflicts between different sound-playback
> applications.
> For example, if I watch a Flash video on Firefox, stop it, and then start
> playing an MP3 file on Totem (a Media Player), I don't hear any sound.
> Once I close Firefox the music from Totem starts coming out.
> This never happened before on my Linux system. I'd be very grateful if
> someone could give me advices!

This symptom is very improbably related to your upgrading of the
driver. Instead, it's a userspace issue. Use "sudo fuser -v /dev/dsp*
/dev/snd/* /dev/seq*" when you're experiencing the symptom to start
troubleshooting.

Best,
-Dan

Re: ALSA Driver 1.0.22.1

[Darsen Lu]

Thanks for the reply.

I tried "fuser -v /dev/dsp* /dev/snd/* /dev/seq*" and found out that Adobe
Flash Player was directly controlling /dev/snd/pcmC0D0p.  That is when I
realized I need to create /etc/asound.conf to route ALSA library to
PulseAudio.  The content of asound.conf follows this webpage
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PulseAudio .

Regards,
Darsen

On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 5:29 AM, Daniel Chen <seven.steps@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 7, 2010 at 3:20 AM, Darsen Lu <darsenlu@gmail.com> wrote:
> > After that I started noticing conflicts between different sound-playback
> > applications.
> > For example, if I watch a Flash video on Firefox, stop it, and then start
> > playing an MP3 file on Totem (a Media Player), I don't hear any sound.
> > Once I close Firefox the music from Totem starts coming out.
> > This never happened before on my Linux system. I'd be very grateful if
> > someone could give me advices!
>
> This symptom is very improbably related to your upgrading of the
> driver. Instead, it's a userspace issue. Use "sudo fuser -v /dev/dsp*
> /dev/snd/* /dev/seq*" when you're experiencing the symptom to start
> troubleshooting.
>
> Best,
> -Dan
>