[PlanetCCRMA] Something's forcing HDMI as default ALSA device

[Janina Sajka]

Hi, Don, Brian, All:

I think I've figured out how to handle my problem. Can't tell for sure
because the staging modules are still not built for the latest Fedora 20
kernel, and that's where Speakup is these days.

But, I'm sure there's some kind of bug. Here's what I did ...

I had my old $25 Chaintech PCI card set as my default ALSA device via
/etc/modprobe.d/local.conf using the ice1724 driver. Nice card for basic
audio, and especially nice as it handles both Speakup using the old IBM
Viavoice TTS and Orca using Speech-Dispatcher and Espeak all via the
same card, which the default intel-hda doesn't do, but that's another
story. I digress.


My complaint is that the ice driver doesn't appear to be loaded with the
newer kernels. Rather the hdmi from my ATI Radeon 6400 is grabbing ALSA
device 0.

On the older kernel the ice correctly grabs 0, the ATI HDMI comes up as
1, and the Intel-HDA remains at 5, where I've set it via local.conf.

So, here's what I did. I edited local.conf and moved the ice1724 to be
device 9.

I also edited /etc/asound.conf, where I have some directives as one
might have via .asoundrc, e.g, I changed:

defaults.ctl.card 9
defaults.pcm.card 9
   defaults.timer.card 9
etc

Now, even though the ATI Radeon HDMI still takes device 0, the Chaintech
comes up as the alsa default device, even though its ID is 9. I expect
Speakup will be happy once the staging rpm is built for the latest
Fedora 20 kernel-3.15.10-200.fc20.x86_64.


But now I'm also pretty sure there's a bug somewhere. I can't tell
where. I can't tell what driver the ATI HDMI is supposedly using. It
doesn't work, errors out on an aplay.

I guess I need to report this somewhere. I suspect it wouldn't matter
what device might be set to 0 via local.conf, the ATI would overwrite
that somewhere.

Janina



Donald Steven writes:
> Janina,
> 
> I suggest you just blacklist it (in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf). 
> For example:
> 
> blacklist snd-hda-intel
> blacklist snd-hda-codecs
> Don
> 
> On 08/16/2014 05:06 PM, Janina Sajka wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Something about the Linux kernel appears to me to have changed sometime
> > after kernel-3.13.10. I'm not certain just exactly when, but all the
> > kernels Fedora has released since 3.13.10 force the HDMI device as the
> > default ALSA audio device.
> >
> > 3.13.10 is the last kernel release where my carefully constructed ALSA
> > audio device ordering identifiers, in /etc/modprobe.d/local.conf,  work as
> > expected.
> > Any kernel beyond puts the onboard hdmi device as the default ALSA
> > device, which is simply untenable in my setup. For me it's not even that
> > I have nothing hanging off my HDMI port, I need the default device for
> > the Speakup screen reader, and I can't affect that on the Speakup side,
> > regretably. So, in effect,the system becomes unusable.
> >
> > I note the CCRMA kernels for Fedora 20 are now also well behind current
> > Fedora releases and wonder if what I'm seeing is just one part of a
> > number of changes relating to audio.
> >
> > Anyone know anything about this? Is there possibly a bug here that
> > should be tagged sooner rather than later? This is a 3-month old issue
> > now.
> >
> > tia
> >
> > Janina
> >
> 
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-- 

Janina Sajka,	Phone:	+1.443.300.2200
			sip:janina at asterisk.rednote.net
		Email:	janina at rednote.net

Linux Foundation Fellow
Executive Chair, Accessibility Workgroup:	http://a11y.org

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)
Chair,	Protocols & Formats	http://www.w3.org/wai/pf
	Indie UI			http://www.w3.org/WAI/IndieUI/