Hi,
While investigating some interesting debug output from PulseAudio, I tried to figure out the cause.
From what I can tell, my Radeon seems to ask for new samples at a very high rate, which I estimate to be around 280 kHz. My radeon card has DVI, HDMI and VGA connectors, and the only thing connected is my screen over DVI.
I'm currently running the 3.13 kernel with updated hda directory from Takashi's tree, but I think it's been this way for a long time.
Note that if a screen is connected to the HDMI card, the problem disappears and sample rates are normal. In short, do you think this is a driver bug, or just something we have to live with as some sort of hw anomaly? Since nothing is connected, it does not really hurt, except PulseAudio gets confused (in a way that could potentially cause problems for low-latency output, should something be connected later on).
For reference, here's lspci of the HDMI card:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710 [Radeon HD 4550] [1002:9540] (prog-if 00 [VGA controller]) Subsystem: PC Partner Limited / Sapphire Technology Device [174b:e106] 01:00.1 Audio device [0403]: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] RV710/730 HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 4000 series] [1002:aa38] Subsystem: PC Partner Limited / Sapphire Technology Device [174b:aa38]