Re: [Sound] Getting MIDI working, getting modules autoloading

Jim Bray (jb@elentari.cs.wcu.edu)
Tue, 3 Feb 1998 09:39:23 -0500 (EST)


On Tue, 3 Feb 1998, Itai Nahshon wrote:

> Jim, the synthesizer device is not MIDI !! It just can be used to play
> midi files. I never used "real" MIDI but I know the difference.

I just wanted 'playmidi' to work, real or ersatz. The changes I made
caused that to happen. It may be fake, but it makes noise, so I'm happy
for now.

> About autoloading, there is a big improvement with the last patch posted
> by Thomas Sailer. Any other "load-on-demand" method is not good, because
> the card driver (sb.o in your case) will unload itself before the main
> sound module (sound.o). Then sound may never work again until you
> manually load sb.o or unload sound.o. (or wait long enough until
> sound.o unloads itself, but you should not try anything because it will
> just fail but reset the module timer).

I have run into that problem. I have not seen it since my recent
conf.modules hacks, tho' I see no clear reason why it is gone. My hope is
that since I load the whole module stack together, they will unload
together. The alternative is to use insmod or modprobe without the "-k",
but of course then you are stuck with them until you manually yank them.

I understand that work is afoot to increase the cleverness of the module
system, such as having it understand minor device numbers. If that is not
sufficient, a conf.modules option to manually specify a dependency would
work. Alternately, I think the problem might be solved now by judicious
use of post-remove hooks in conf.modules. If I have trouble with it again,
I will try that.

If the Thomas Sailer patches fix it, they will hopefully be in a
forthcoming patch-2....gz.

--Jim <a href="http://as220.org/jb"> My Page: as220.org/jb </a>