Extremely broken sound drivers (and modutils)

Bob McElrath (mcelrath@draal.physics.wisc.edu)
Sun, 25 Oct 1998 18:46:31 -0600 (EST)


So (as posted before) I can't get my PAS16 sound card to work on my alpha
164LX, so I started hacking around in the code, and discovered basically
that the sound code is, in general, *very* broken. (bug reports follow)
What I'm wondering is: who is maintaining the sound code? And who are these
4front-tech people? I'd like to put some effort into fixing the sound code,
but don't want to buy their code. Is there anyone else out there working on
this stuff, or interested in working on this? The 4front-tech page only
says that the drivers are being maintained by an "independent group" but
doesn't say who...

Bugs:

1) problem with DMA initialization of PAS16 on my machine (this may be
hardware, but I doubt it, it is more likely an alpha-specific issue
since the same card works on an intel box...)

2) kernel module "soundcore" does not properly keep the "used" variable.
This makes it impossible to remove this module.

3) module "sound" does not properly de-allocate DMA resources. Try
insmod'ing a driver, rmmod'ing it, and then insmod'ing it at a
different DMA.

4) module "soundcore" has a memory leak in the mixer code (marked by "FIXME"
in the source). This has the effect that if you insmod and rmmod
drivers multiple times, at some point it becomes unable to install
new drivers, and can crash your kernel.

5) "modinfo -p <anything>" goes into an infinite loop...though this isn't a
sound problem. "modinfo <anything>" just sits there. (modutils
2.1.121) Is modutils broken too?

-- Bob

./'^`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'#`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'~`\._./'^`\.
/ Rube Goldberg? Bah! Amateur! I give you..Windows 98! Linux everywhere \
| Linux, because everyone's work is mission critical. ANYTHING inside. |
|_Bob McElrath (mcelrath@wisconsin.cern.ch) Univ. of Wisconsin at Madison_|
\.___________________________________________________________________./

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