[Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#697651: Fails to restore mixer settings

[Michael Biebl]

Package: alsa-utils
Version: 1.0.25-3
Severity: serious

Hi,

dropping the udev rule in #636437 was a mistake and done for the wrong
reasons.
Without the udev rule, the mixer levels are no longer correctly
restored for hot plugged sound hardware or if the driver takes longer to
initialize the hardware, as relying on the init script is racy.

On my SSD system, where the complete boot takes less then 3 secs, the
alsa-utils init script is run before the sound module has been loaded
and initialized the hardware.

The udev rules thus needs to be added back.
I think this needs to be fixed for wheezy, especially since this is a
regression from squeeze, where we do have the udev rule.
So I'm marking this as RC.

There is the /usr-on-separate-partition issue, and the justification
why the udev rules was mistakenly removed in the first place.
We could move alsactl and libasound to /lib and /sbin, but we actually
don't need to do that. If the udev rule is triggered before /usr is
mounted, we can simply skip the alsactl call, since we now the sysv init
script will run later.
So all we have to do is to add a TEST for the existence of the
/usr/sbin/alsactl binary and skip the rule if the binary is not
available yet. This avoids the udev warning which apparently confuses
some users.

Michael




-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.0
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (200, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_DE.utf8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages alsa-utils depends on:
ii  kmod            9-2
ii  libasound2      1.0.25-4
ii  libc6           2.13-38
ii  libncursesw5    5.9-10
ii  libsamplerate0  0.1.8-5
ii  libtinfo5       5.9-10
ii  lsb-base        4.1+Debian9
ii  whiptail        0.52.14-10

Versions of packages alsa-utils recommends:
ii  alsa-base  1.0.25+2+nmu2
ii  pciutils   1:3.1.9-6

alsa-utils suggests no packages.

-- no debconf information