[Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#240125: The new broken world of 2.6, ALSA, and hotplug.

[Gabor Gombas]

Hi,

I'd like to note that the breakage is not limited to multiple soundcards.
I have a SAA7134-based tuner card, and the following happens with the new
hotplug:

1. hotplug finds the tuner card and loads saa7134.ko, which pulls in the
   ALSA OSS emulation modules due to module dependencies. But this causes
   saa7134 to register itself as /dev/dsp instead of the previous
   /dev/dsp1.

2. ALSA starts, and tries to register the sound card (snd_intel8x0) as
   card 0 (which is correct, since I do have only one card). But since
   saa7134 already occupied the OSS slot #0, the OSS compatibility layer
   registration fails. This means that the sound card cannot be accessed
   using the OSS interface at all.

The saa7134 module has parameters to work around these issuses (I know
because I have read the driver source), but average users will not know
about them and will not know how to set them. So this is a definite
regression compared to the previous "just works without any black magic"
state.

Gabor

-- 
     Gabor Gombas
     ---------------------------------------------------------
     MTA SZTAKI Computer and Automation Research Institute
                Hungarian Academy of Sciences,
     Laboratory of Parallel and Distributed Systems
     Address   : H-1132 Budapest Victor Hugo u. 18-22. Hungary
     Phone/Fax : +36 1 329-78-64 (secretary)
     W3        : http://www.lpds.sztaki.hu
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