Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 65047
Sound skips and pops with ALSA sound
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:02 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0rc1) Gecko/20020417 Description of problem: Chromium runs fine as far as gameplay and graphics go when I use either the OSS/Free drivers that come with RH7.3 or the ALSA0.90rc1 drivers. Bu the sound does not work fine with ALSA0.90rc1. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install the ALSA 0.90rc1 drivers 2. Run Chromium Actual Results: Sound pops and doesn't work well. Expected Results: Sound should work properly. Additional info: The reason that that I am using the ALSA0.90rc1 drivers at all is that the OSS/Free drivers do not seem to properly support full duplex or even recording at all on my laptop's i810+ac97 sound setup. The ALSA drivers seem to work for me in gnomemeeting, xmms, MPlayer, and even Tux Racer. Chromium seems to be the only problem. This suggests that the bug is in Chromium and not in ALSA. A workaround that seems to work is to make sure that no sound apps are running and then unloading ALSA kernel modules and switching /etc/modules.conf to use OSS/Free instead. Upon finishing the game of chromium, one can switch back the same way to run ALSA again. The sound hardware is an IBM X22 Thinkpad with an ICH3 soundchip with Cirrus Logic CS4299 rev 6 ac97 codec.
To help debug this, I installed the ALSA drivers on one of my Dell P3 desktops that has a Creative Soundblaster 16PCI sound card (es1371 drivers in OSS and snd-ens1371 in ALSA). There are no skips or pops with either the OSS or ALSA drivers in that case. So I suspect that the problem here is some more subtle thing having to do with the combination of chromium, ALSA0.9rc1, and the laptop's hardware.
if you want to have alsa support in chromium you have to rebuild chromium with -enable-alsa. Red Hat does not support ALSA sound.