Re: [BUG] no sound on ppc mac mini

[john stultz <johnstul@us.ibm.com>]

On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 10:50 +1000, Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> > However...  ;)
> > 
> > It seems the new device doesn't have any volume control. I know the old
> > toonie driver used some form of softvol support, but "it just worked",
> > where as now I have no control over my system's audio volume.
> 
> It's a userland problem :) Your alsa config needs to enable the softvol
> plugin for it.

Yea. I figured. :( I've played around a bit w/ the .asoundrc file to
re-enable softvol (A similar hack was needed originally after the toonie
driver went in), but so far I've been unsuccessful.

> > While not the most terrible of regressions, its a bit irritating (waking
> > to loud mail notifications, specifically :). Is this something that I
> > have to wait for an alsa userland update to fix, or is the new kernel
> > driver just not fully functional yet?
> 
> Part of the problem is that you can't anymore identify the type of codec
> based on the card name thus Alsa old mecanism of having a specific
> toonie config file that includes softvol doesn't work any more. The
> trick was bad in the first place though because you can have multiple
> different codecs anyway, so it didn't scale. (The old driver couldn't
> deal with it, but the new one can, though we haven't yet implemented
> support for any of the topaz digital codecs).
> 
> I remember a discussion with the Alsa folks where it was question to
> have Alsa userland automatically instanciate softvol if there is no
> volume provided by the driver, which is a better approach.
> 
> Takashi, was this ever implemented ? John, what is your Alsa userland
> version ?

1.0.10-4ubuntu4

thanks
-john