I have a Soundblaster 16PCI. For many years, alsa has had a bug where
not all of the card's controls are detected (many alsa versions,
many kernel versions). In particular, Master Playback Volume is
usually not detected, and so I get no sound or extremely faint sound.
The problem has always been inconsistent: sometimes all of the controls
are detected correctly, and sometimes a partial set is detected. It works
correctly about 10% of the time.
Finally, I got around to tracking down the problem. When the driver
fails, it prints the kernel message "AC'97 0 analog subsections not
ready". This message is generated from the function snd_ac97_mixer()
in ac97_codec.c. The message indicates that the card failed to come
back after reset within the time limit. The time limit is
120 milliseconds.
I tried increasing the time limit to 1 second, and found that this
made the driver work about 70% of the time. I tried increasing it
to 5 seconds, and it now seems to work 100% of the time.
I expect that this change would be completely harmless for
existing cards that work, and would only introduce additional
delay for cards that do not work.
ALSA bug#4032.
Signed-off-by: Steve Soule <sts11dbxr@gmail.com>
Signed-off-by: Jaroslav Kysela <perex@perex.cz>
f74890277a