alsa not working in Dapper (ac97)

[Chris Lee]

alsa-base: 1.0.10-3
linux-image-2.6.15-8-686

My laptop has AC97 sound. Sound worked in Breezy and before, but not in Dapper.
 Before upgrade to latest ALSA, I could use the OSS interface on top of ALSA, so
RealPlayer worked, etc..., but the ALSA interface was broken. Now, now sound is
working.

On boot, I am getting:

[17179585.996000] snd_pcm: Unknown symbol snd_card_file_remove
[17179585.996000] snd_pcm: Unknown symbol snd_info_unregister
[17179585.996000] snd_pcm: Unknown symbol snd_device_register
[17179585.996000] snd_pcm: Unknown symbol snd_register_device
[17179585.996000] snd_pcm: Unknown symbol snd_info_get_line
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_info_register
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_add
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_info_free_entry
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_interval_refine
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_find_id
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_new1
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_ctl_remove_id
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_component_add
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_pcm_hw_rule_add
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_iprintf
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_device_new
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_info_create_card_entry
[17179586.128000] snd_ac97_codec: Unknown symbol snd_info_unregister
[17179586.156000] snd: Unknown parameter `device_mode'
[17179586.160000] snd_timer: Unknown symbol snd_info_register
[17179586.160000] snd_timer: Unknown symbol snd_info_create_module_entry
[17179586.160000] snd_timer: Unknown symbol snd_info_free_entry

etc...

[Chris Lee (chris-lee-gertner)]

Excuse me -- "Now, *no* sound is working." Bad typo :)

[Takayama (hohenberg)]

Confirmed on my Acer Extensa Laptop, same problem.

[Zooko Wilcox-O'Hearn (zooko)]

My desktop has AC97 sound (Via 8233a), and when I upgraded from Hoary to Breezy
sound broke. I reported it here already: it's not clear to me which site is the
official Ubuntu bug-reporting site:

https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.12/+bug/6032

[Ville M. Vainio (villemvainio)]

Confirmed on my #2 machine, with snd-es1688. I get a flood of "Unknown Symbol blah blah" as well. Both 2.6.15-10 and 2.6.15-12 malfunction. Tried to boot with kernels 2.6.10 and 2.6.12, sound worked ok (but other things were broken).

[Thomas Hood (jdthood)]

This should be reassigned to the kernel maintainers.

[Chris Lee (chris-lee-gertner)]

I'm still having this problem with 2.6.15-14-686.

I tried purging alsa and reinstalling, with no improvement.

[Chris Lee (chris-lee-gertner)]

Problem persist with:

alsa-base 1.0.10-4ubuntu3
alsa-utils 1.0.10-1ubuntu6

[Tero Karvinen (karvinen+launchpad)]

No sound on my Dapper Flight 3 on Acer Travelmate 3000 (3004WTMi), intel 915 machine.

Somehow depends on kernel parameters. If I change acpi settings (some combination of acpi=off pci=noacpi) I can get the gdm "welcome to login screen" sound play in an annoying infinite loop.

[Chris Lee (chris-lee-gertner)]

I had a file (not sure if I added it myself some years ago, or if it was automatically deposited...)

 /etc/modprobe.d/sound

That contained the line:

 options snd device_mode=0660

Some googling located the information that this option is no longer used in alsa. Removing this line, caused the 'snd' module to become loadablee on my system, and thus sound works once again.

[Greg Haywood (ghaywood)]

Toshiba A70 with AC97 snd also does not load with Dapper flight 4, so sound at all.
Lots of atiixp codec timeouts

[Haico van Roeden (brainball)]

I can confirm that the solution listed above solves the problem for me:
 /etc/modprobe.d/sound

That contained the line:

 options snd device_mode=0660

[Timo Jyrinki (timo-jyrinki)]

Same here. But if a breezy user has that line, this is a very serious problem when upgrading - I already recompiled the kernel, noticed that everything finally worked when I compiled alsa modules inside the kernel image instead of modules etc. Basically for the user it seems like the whole sound system is broken in the kernel, even if he would know to look at dmesg and try to self-compile alsa-driver - every time a failure and no indication that the whole missing symbols stuff is related to that one parameter set.

Now I don't think that I've added that line to modprobe.d myself, but I could be wrong. Maybe it's automatically added in breezy (or even hoary?) if multiple audio cards are found, or something like that? A special case anyway, but it would seem very good idea to search and remove that line in dapper!

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

alsa-base bug. Has nothing to do with linux-source-2.6.15.

[Daniel T Chen (crimsun)]

dist-upgrade from Breezy to Dapper results in /etc/modprobe.d/sound being removed. Closing bug, please reopen if dist-upgrade still fails.