Re: sb live (emu10k1) stops working between 2.6.23.1 and 2.6.23.7

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Sat, 17 Nov 2007 12:18:29 -0500 (EST),
Jim Faulkner wrote:
> 
> 
> I've done some more testing this morning, and it appears that the "ALSA:
> emu10k1 - Fix memory corruption" patch from 2.6.23.6 has broken digital
> output on my SB Live Value card.  Simply replacing the 2.6.23.7 emumixer.c
> with the version included in 2.6.23.1 I was able to get digital output
> working again under 2.6.23.7.
> 
> This does not appear to be a simple matter of adjusting the alsa mixer to
> compsensate for how the mixer controls are exposed to userspace.  I have
> duplicated all alsamixer settings between 2.6.23.1 and stock 2.6.23.7 in
> the "F5" view all controls mode, but still received no audio output.  I
> also tried adjusting other volume controls which normally do not need
> adjusting, but got nowhere.  It appears that the 2.6.23.6 emu10k1 patch
> broke digital output entirely on this card.
> 
> Just to add to the information in my first message, the SB Live card is
> connected from the yellow jack on the card to the "Digital Coax Input"
> connector on my external amplifier.

It's no regression of the driver.  The problem is just a wrong use of
alsactl in your init script.  It should use -F option to ignore
unmatching elements, which is caused when a mixer element is removed
or renamed.

This problem doesn't happen so often (as we try to keep the
compatibility as much as possible), so I didn't realize some distros 
still doing wrong for years.

Anyway, this won't be a problem in future since I changed the default
behavior of alsactl to with -F.


Takashi