Fedora development currently ships kernel-2.6.8-1.584 (including alsa-driver 1.0.4) and alsa-lib-1.0.6-1. This causes - at least - applications to use the wrong device (/dev/snd/pcmC0D2p) for AC3 passtrough with emu10k1 based soundcards.
Is this something that needs provides or conflicts at the kernel level? (ewww)
this sounds really broken.
This means that the device descriptions in /usr/share/alsa from alsa-lib do not necessarily match the devices provided by the kernel driver if the versions do not match. I would suggest to provide alsa-driver in the kernel and require the matching version from alsa-lib.
that sooooooo sounds the wrong thing. Very very wrong. You don't want half your userland to go up or down depending on which exact kernel you boot.
I think 2.6.8-1.584 does have the 1.0.6 kernel updates. This was incorporated from the bk-alsa.patch sometime ago.
Uhm, I think Sammy is right, I have found "Advanced Linux Sound Architecture Driver Version 1.0.6 (Sun Aug 15 07:17:53 2004 UTC)." in /lib/modules/2.6.8-1.541smp/kernel/sound/core/snd.ko
Coming back to this; if ALSA 1.0.6 is in the kernel, where is the problem coming from?
I have been using a stock 2.6.8.1 kernel, not the Fedora supplied and patched one, but the problem persists, you need to downgrade alsa-lib if you boot an old kernel.
This isn't really solvable in this context. We can't randomly change libraries depending on which kernel you boot. Hence, we just have to make sure that the library stays current with the drivers in the kernel. (And possibly get a sane release model from upstream... oh well.)