alsa power-saving ambarass my laptop's mute led

[Nicolas Delvaux]

I don't know if this is an alsa-driver or kernel issue, so I let you decide.

There is a touch-sensitive mute led on my laptop which have two colors: red when sound is mute and blue when it isn't.
The problem is that when sound is mute (red led) and that the sound card is automatically disabled for power-saving, then the led become blue.

You can imagine that this is annoying because each time I'm looking at my keyboard I think that sound is not mute !

(sorry for my English)

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
ArecordDevices:
 **** List of CAPTURE Hardware Devices ****
 card 0: Intel [HDA Intel], device 0: AD198x Analog [AD198x Analog]
   Subdevices: 2/2
   Subdevice #0: subdevice #0
   Subdevice #1: subdevice #1
AudioDevicesInUse:
 USER PID ACCESS COMMAND
 /dev/snd/controlC0: nicolas 2679 F.... pulseaudio
Card0.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:0 'Intel'/'HDA Intel at 0xd8420000 irq 17'
   Mixer name : 'Analog Devices AD1984A'
   Components : 'HDA:11d4194a,103c30e7,00100400 HDA:11c11040,103c1378,00100200'
   Controls : 22
   Simple ctrls : 14
Card1.Amixer.info:
 Card hw:1 'HDMI'/'HDA ATI HDMI at 0xd8310000 irq 17'
   Mixer name : 'ATI R6xx HDMI'
   Components : 'HDA:1002aa01,00aa0100,00100000'
   Controls : 4
   Simple ctrls : 1
Card1.Amixer.values:
 Simple mixer control 'IEC958',0
   Capabilities: pswitch pswitch-joined
   Playback channels: Mono
   Mono: Playback [off]
Date: Wed Oct 21 00:00:03 2009
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 9.10
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala" - Alpha i386 (20091015)
NonfreeKernelModules: fglrx
Package: alsa-base 1.0.20+dfsg-1ubuntu5
PackageArchitecture: all
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.31-14.48-generic
SourcePackage: alsa-driver
Uname: Linux 2.6.31-14-generic i686

[Trafex (trafex)]

I've this to with a HP Pavilion DV9000 laptop. The annoying thing is that when the mute turns off, my laptop makes a *plop* sound. This happens every time when the sound is automatically turned on again.

[Martin Meyer (elreydetodo)]

I see this also on my HP EliteBook 8530w laptop. In my case the changing color of the LED has helped me diagnose another issue.. my sound card seems to be sleeping at irregular times and waking up randomly. Sadly the times it wakes up does not seem even slightly related to when I'm trying to play sounds. I'll be filing a new bug about that soon.

Anyway, the reporter and I seem to be using the same (or very similar) audio controller:

Codec: Analog Devices AD1984A
Address: 0
Function Id: 0x1
Vendor Id: 0x11d4194a
Subsystem Id: 0x103c30e7
Revision Id: 0x100400

I think this is an issue in how the driver handles our particular card. I've attached my complete info from the alsa project's alsa-info.sh script.

[firefox3107 (firefox3107)]

work around but it works
I set the power_save to a high value in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf so it never sleeps.
Perhaps someone finds a better solution.

# Power down HDA controllers after 10 idle seconds
options snd-hda-intel power_save=300000 power_save_controller=Y

[jmrk (joergen-kornfeld)]

i have an 8530w and the mute button at least does not work properly too. but i'm not sure, whether it's the same bug as in the thread since i have
# Power down HDA controllers after 10 idle seconds
options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N
in /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf
so the N might indicate that this option is never used? at least the LED button seems to be not very well synchronized with the actual mixer state (well, sometimes only..). by playing with it, i always got some working sound but it's a quite random game. might be related with suspend and waking up again.

[Martin Meyer (elreydetodo)]

There were a few lines from the Alsa 1.0.22 change log that sounded like they might resolve some or all of the issues I was seeing with my laptop.

Change log: http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Changes_v1.0.21_v1.0.22

In particular:
ALSA: hda - Unmute docking line-out as default with AD1984A codec
ALSA: hda - Add missing GPIO initialization for AD1984A laptop model
ALSA: hda - Add support of docking auto-mute/mic for AD1984A laptop model
ALSA: hda - Fix LED GPIO setup for HP laptops with IDT codecs
ALSA: hda - Fix mute-LED sync on HP laptops with IDT92HD83xxx codecs
ALSA: hda - Enable GPIO control for mute LED on HP systems

I'm not completely sure which of the last three might apply to our specific laptop, but chances are this laptop's sound will work better in 2.6.33 (b/c that kernel will have this version of Alsa).

[Nicolas Delvaux (malizor)]

I confirm that this is fix on Lucid.

Is a Karmic backport possible ?