[Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#679056: Bug still present

[Marcelo Fiscella]

I can confirm that this bug is still present in Debian 7.4.

I have found at least two different motherboards manufactured by
Gigabyte on which the sound card doesn't work at all after performing a
fresh install of Wheezy (you can't even access the audio mixer). 

These motherboards have an integrated Intel High Definition Audio
interface (and they use a Realtek ALC887-VD audio codec, but perhaps 
that's irrelevant). 

I've done the following experiments:

1) Upgrading the stock kernel (3.2.54) to the one provided through
   wheezy-backports (3.13.7) solves the problem.

2) Compiling and installing the latest alsa drivers (while keeping the
   3.2 kernel image) also solves the problem.

After having performed those experiments, I think that the problem lies
in the snd_hda_intel module (it's probably identifying the sound card
model in a wrong way, preventing it from working properly).

That might also explain why the workaround proposed by Shawn works: by
setting model=auto, the module is able to identify the sound card model
in the right way.

If the problem is being caused by some bug in snd_hda_intel (which
seems likely), then this a bug present in a kernel module that is taken
from the ALSA project and distributed as part of the linux-image
package (and it's not a bug in the alsa-base package). 

Perhaps if this bug report had been dealt with timely, this problem
wouldn't be present in Wheezy (the report was submitted about 2 years
ago, and almost a year before Wheezy's release). 

For the time being, it looks like the only workaround is the one
suggested by Shawn (unless you are willing to upgrade your kernel,
rebuild the alsa drivers or buy another motherboard).


Regards,
Marcelo