Hi,
the state of VIA VT1708 in the current kernel is far from optimal. It would be good to improve the situation, at least for 2.6.38. On the machine here, I experience at least these bugs:
1) "Jack detect" switch has no function:
* When turning "Jack detect" off, quitting alsamixer, then restarting it, "Jack detect" is still on. * When turning "Jack detect" off, then turning it on again, alsamixer crashes with the message "alsamixer: hcontrol.c:764: snd_hctl_handle_event: Assertion `elem' failed."
2) Plugging headphones in toggles "Front" switch control
* This should probably just be removed, especially with the latest opinion from Takashi of what "Front" really means. The problem is worsened by that PulseAudio seems to pick it up in some circumstances and thinks that it should mute everything.
3) Several users report headphones output being broken
* Symptoms vary a little and some might be due to bug 2), but some however report the headphones volume being "grayed out" in alsamixer. I haven't seen that in particular on the hardware here.
4) All these extra controls - "Independent HP", "Jack Detect", "Smart 5.1"
I assume they are meant to add extra functionality, and of course I don't mind that, but the problem is that since these are not very well described (or am I missing documentation somewhere?) it's difficult to know the exact intended functionality of these, and without knowing that, it's even more difficult to fix it when it's broken (or even knowing if it is broken or not!).
Any ideas and/or opinions? Should we talk to VIA about it, after all they seem to have written a lot of the code here? Or can someone here cast some light on these issues?