Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 76987
No sound (other than system beeps) since upgrade to RH 8.0
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:48:02 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20021023 Description of problem: I did a clean install of RH 8.0 (reformatting the disk) on my computer, which was running RH 7.3 without problems. Ever since the install my system cannot play sounds, other than system beeps of course (so it's not my speakers). This includes when playing games, running XMMS, using RealPlayer, or just running "play". I grabbed sndconfig using up2date to see if that would help. It seems to recognize my card - it reports back "Model: ESS Technology\ES19835 Maestro-3i PCI Audio Accelerator". When it tries to play its test sound, though, I get a loud "click" through the speakers, and then nothing - sndconfig just hangs. When trying to play sounds I've noticed that esd starts to eat up a lot of CPU time. This continues until I 'killall esd'. Running lsmod gives the following: $ lsmod Module Size Used by Not tainted maestro3 30896 2 soundcore 6532 2 [maestro3] ac97_codec 13416 0 (autoclean) [maestro3] parport_pc 19108 1 (autoclean) lp 8996 0 (autoclean) parport 37152 1 (autoclean) [parport_pc lp] autofs 13348 1 (autoclean) ds 8712 2 yenta_socket 12960 2 pcmcia_core 54784 0 [ds yenta_socket] xircom_cb 8968 1 ipt_REJECT 3736 2 (autoclean) iptable_filter 2412 1 (autoclean) ip_tables 14936 2 [ipt_REJECT iptable_filter] ide-scsi 10512 0 scsi_mod 107240 1 [ide-scsi] ide-cd 33608 0 cdrom 33696 0 [ide-cd] nls_iso8859-1 3516 4 (autoclean) nls_cp437 5148 4 (autoclean) vfat 13084 4 (autoclean) fat 38712 0 (autoclean) [vfat] mousedev 5524 1 keybdev 2976 0 (unused) hid 22244 0 (unused) input 5920 0 [mousedev keybdev hid] usb-uhci 26188 0 (unused) usbcore 77024 1 [hid usb-uhci] ext3 70368 2 jbd 52212 2 [ext3] Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Turn on computer. 2. Try to play a sound that's not a system beep. 3. Actual Results: Nothing. Expected Results: Sound should play. Additional info: I'm running RH 8.0 on a Dell Inspiron 3800 laptop, with a Maestro ESS sound card. Sound worked fine in previous versions of RH 7.1 - 7.3. Although I reported this against esound, I really don't know if that's the culprit. It could be the kernel modules I suppose.
More information. I grabbed kernel 2-4.19 from kernel.org, applied the ac-4 patch to it, and built that kernel (with Maestro3 support still modular). Booting from that kernel (with no changes to esound settings etc.) solves the problem - so I'm pretty sure it is NOT an esound problem. I'm changing the component to "kernel" (if bugzilla allows me to do that).
I have observed the same bug on my Dell Inspiron 8100. Additionally, I have been able to verify that sound works with kernel-2.4.18-14, but not with kernel-2.4.18-17.8.0
http://people.redhat.com/arjanv/testkernels <-- proposed fix
The sound worked with kernel-2.4.18-17.2.i686.rpm!
The test kernel has solved the sound problem for me as well. At first glance everything seems to be working (no new problems introduced by the test kernel, in other words).