I have two sound cards that use the ad1848 module -- one is a Yamaha SA3 isa pnp card and the other an old Oak Technology OTI601 Mozart card. These both used to work when I manually entered configuration stuff for them in /etc/conf.modules with RH5.1 and kernel 2.0.35 (yes, Red Hat's kernel, not a custom compile). If I boot into single user mode and play an MP3 with mpg123, I can listen to it for around a minute and then it suddenly hard locks. If there is anything else going on in the computer, such as hard disk accesses, the computer is sure to crash. That is, if I put mpg123 in the background and do a ls -lR /, the machine locks immediately instead of playing for a minute or two. My system specs: AMD K6-166 Achitec ACHI156 motherboard 128MB 10ns SDRAM
Haven't had problems with the ad1848 module here. Does this occur with both sound cards, or just one of them? Are you just using the ad1848/mpu401 combination on the OPL3-SA3, or are you using the beta OPL3-SAX driver? One thing you might try is using hdparm to turn off DMA mode on your hard drive; on some motherboard/IDE chipset combinations, there have been problems reported with DMA and sound cards. (This is just a stab in the dark - it might not work.)
I've talked with Alan; he confirmed that it's a problem with the VIA chipset on your motherboard and a (needed) fix that went into the sound drivers in 2.0.36. What you can try is the patch (see the 'email' section in bugzilla); apply it, rebuild, & reinstall the kernel - does that solve your problem?
This looks promising. The 2.1.129ac6 kernel (which included this fix, I assume) worked with sound on my computer and was the first 2.1.x kernel to ever work on my computer with sound (but 2.1.129ac6 is still unusable for day to day use -- it randomly crashes for no reason). I will try this patch on the kernel 2.0.36 SRPM and see if it works there.
This patch fixed it. Thanks!
Oops, spoke too soon. The new sound support, even with the DMA patch, still hard locks my machine once in a while. In x11amp, it only crashes at the end of a song (when playing a whole list of songs). It doesn't always crash, but once in a while it does. I've never seen it crash in the middle of a song, just the end (maybe that could be viewed as the beginning of the next song, I dunno). 2.1.131ac9 also hard locks due to sound. Same symptoms, and I got it to crash once when I pressed the pause button in x11amp. This when sound was playing and I wanted it to stop. On 2.0.36 with the dma patch, it crashed one time in the middle of a WAV played back by the "play" command in Red Hat 5.2. So it's not specific to x11amp. Is there any way to print out a list of the kernel sound calls x11amp makes when the pause button is pressed? As it is, I don't know where to look in the kernel sound code for the problem. Note: in 2.1.131-ac9 I had to steal the 2.0.36 mad16.c file because the one that comes with 2.1.131-ac9 breaks support for my Oak Technology Mozart sound card (can't detect it).
To find out system calls run 'strace': strace x11amp (dumps all x11amp system calls) strace -f x11amp (if x11amp is multithreaded, use this) strace -p 13516 (attach to already running process 13516) You may have to manually decode the hex ioctl() calls. strace tries but doesn't always keep up with all the existing kernel calls. This probably won't successfully display the one system call that is crashing the system unless you run it (strace) on a virtual console. It might show the system call previous to the one that causes a crash, then, well, crash.