[alsa-devel] No recording on hda-intel (AD1981HD)

[Takashi Iwai]

At Thu, 07 Feb 2008 13:09:24 +0100,
I wrote:
> 
> At Wed, 6 Feb 2008 12:09:35 +0100,
> Grzegorz Chwesewicz wrote:
> > 
> > From Andrew Morton:
> > 
> > "Recording the bug in the alsa bugtracker is good, and Takashi is actively
> > working on the bug, and he is the best guy to do that.
> > 
> > So I don't think anything else really needs to be done here - please work
> > with him on solving this?"
> > 
> > ######################################
> > 
> > Hi, Takashi, so can You help ? Below is my letter to LKML (in case You haven't 
> > read it yet).
> 
> Don't worry, I've been reading it, but had too little time to track
> down.
> 
> > Problem description:
> > 
> > I have a problem with recording on HP nx6325 notebook (hda-intel with AD1981HD 
> > codec). Playback works fine, but after 5-10 min. of recording microphone 
> > stops working (playback works all the time). Unloading and loading sound 
> > modules fixes problem, but only for another 5-10 minutes. This problem exists 
> > from more than a year (at least from 2.6.17.13 kernel). In [1] we came to 
> > conclusion that this problem is ralated to IRQ sharing [2] (HDA Intel is on 
> > the same IRQ as sata_sil). 
> > 
> > How to reproduce the problem:
> > 
> > 1) on one console run arecord and see the output (You should see some garbage)
> > 2) on another console run cat /etc/*
> > 3) at once arecord on the first console gives no output
> > 
> > So, doing lot of hdd I/O occurs problem with mic.
> > 
> > What had been done:
> > 
> > 1) I tried to boot Fedora 8 livecd and unload sata_sil, so that hda_intel was 
> > the only device using IRQ. After that microphone was working all the time (I 
> > left recording for all night, and in the morning I had almost 2h voip chat 
> > using Twinkle). So when sata_sil is unloaded, and hda-intel is not sharing 
> > the IRQ, the mic. is working all the time. Look at [3] to 
> > see /proc/interrupts output when laptop is booted from livecd, and mic works.
> > 
> > 2) I tried to load hda-intel with enable_msi=1 (my RS480 chip is on blacklist, 
> > but I've removed it). Module loads and playback works ok, but problem with 
> > mic still exists. Difference here is that when recording stops to work the 
> > playback also stops to work (without MSI only mic stops to work). Look at [4] 
> > to see /proc/interrupts output when module is loaded with enable_msi=1.
> > 
> > Question:
> > 
> > What information I need to provide to help resolving the problem ? Where to 
> > start, because I've run out of ideas :) ?
> 
> This is a pretty nasty bug.  Appreantly this seems specific to ATI
> chipset, and I'm not sure whether it's AD1981HD specific, too.
> (Due to the fact that it's related with IRQ, I guess rather not
>  specific to the codec chip.)
> 
> It's nice that you already tried MSI as I suggsted.
> Could you check whether the irq handler still gets called?  For
> example, try the patch below and see whether the message appears.

BTW, do you have problems found in below?
	https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=297703

According to the reporter, nc6400 with AD1981 has a problem with
headphone jack auto-muting and with the non-linear master volume.

I supplied two test patches there.


Takashi