[Alsa-user] Invalid ioctl on intel8x0 in latest kernels

[Leif J. <je...@ma...>]

I use alsa sound with SuSE 7.3 on my new laptop, which has an Intel 815 or
compatible chipset.  For a couple of reasons I am upgrading SuSE's 2.4.10
kernel to a more recent one, but I have encountered problems.

First of all, i810 sound is completely broken in the latest stable kernel,
which is 2.4.16.  Of course 2.4.15 is unusable because of the umount bug.
I have been using the 2.4.17-preX series, since the changelog to -pre1
mentioned a fix to the broken i810 sound.

The basic sound driver operates as it should.  The problem that I am
seeing is that something has broken the mixer.  When calling alsactl to
load or store mixer settings, I get the following error:

# alsactl store
alsactl: MIXER open error: Invalid argument
#

When calling alsamixer I get this:

# alsamixer

alsamixer: failed to open mixer #0/#0: Invalid argument
#

I used strace to track the source of the problem and it seems to be
here:

# strace alsactl store
execve("/usr/sbin/alsactl", ["alsactl", "store"], [/* 82 vars */]) = 0
....... etc ......
open("/dev/snd/mixerC0D0", O_RDWR)      = 4
ioctl(4, RNDGETENTCNT, 0xbffff268)      = -1 EINVAL (Invalid argument)
close(4)                                = 0
....... dies .....


In 2.4.10, the same produces instead:

open("/dev/snd/mixerC0D0", O_RDWR)      = 4
ioctl(4, RNDGETENTCNT, 0xbffff274)      = 0
ioctl(4, 0xc0105210, 0xbffff2cc)        = 0
ioctl(4, 0xc0105210, 0xbffff2cc)        = 0
....... etc .......
ioctl(4, 0xc0985220, 0x805a530)         = 0
ioctl(4, 0xc0985220, 0x805a668)         = 0
close(4)

Any hints would be very much appreciated.  I can make changes to my
local build, but perhaps there is still some bug in the kernel that
should be fixed.

Best,
-- 
Leif Jensen
je...@ma..., Mathematics Department, Columbia Univ.