This problem now appears to be bigger than just sbawe or ALSA.
- The clone-and-reallocate behavior happened with the gameport too, even though I didn't mess with that at all. The gameport is discovered by some driver as a legacy port, then later rediscovered and reallocated with different resources as a PnP gameport.
- The kernel parameter pnp_reserve_dma, which ought to be the right way to avoid getting DMA 5, doesn't do anything.
The cleanest workaround seems to be to noisapnp the kernel, use the userspace /sbin/isapnp tool, and provide ALSA module options as for a non-PnP card.
On 03/23/2013 10:25 PM, David Flater wrote:
I've got an ISA PnP SB AWE type card in a system with a non-working DMA 5. Without intervention, the Sound Blaster always gets the broken DMA. I have no BIOS options to control the allocation of DMAs, and the PnP configuration done within ALSA ignores /etc/isapnp.conf [*]. DMA 6 works fine if I can get sbawe to stop re-initializing the PnP and just use it.