Okay so I finally got fed up w/ my via chipset booting whenever it fealt like it and decided to get a new mobo/cpu for my mythbox. Everything seems to be working fine w/ my new hardare except for sound. The only way I can get the box to boot at all is to disable onboard sound. If I leave integrated sound ("HD Audio" option) enabled in the bios I get the following kernel Oops right out of the gate:



Followed by a call trace which I can retrieve on request. Keep in mind this is hand typed so their may be a typo here or there, but it's pretty accurate.

I've never had such a low level problem, and a little unsure what to do. Any suggestions?

Here's my hardware setup:
Audio Chipset: ALC861VD
AMD Athlon 64 3800+
Biostar NF61S Motherboard
Geforce 6100 (MCP61S) Chipset
256 MB x2 DDR
Seagate 200 GB PATA HD
PVR-350 using TV-OUT
PVR-250

What version of kernel and KM are you using.

According to this, Ubuntu Hoary had a problem similar to this with kernel 2.6.12.
Though doing a bit more of a search, it seems to appear in 2.6.2x in Fiesty, as referred to here. So it does not appear to fixed yet, so the only thing is to black list the driver as mentioned in the first URL.
Bruce S.

_________________
Updated 2019/10/26: AthlonII X2 265 Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P
16Gb PC 1866 DDR3, 500GB+2TB+4TB SATA HDD,
SATA DVD-RW Asus DRW-24D5MT , NVIDIA GeForce GT1080
Hauppauage Nova-T 500, Nova-T LinHes R8.6.1

Hey Bruce,
Wow thanks for digging up that thread for me. I'll give the suggestions therein a try, and hopefully get something working.

To answer your question, I'm running R5F1 which uses 2.6.18-chw-13.

Thanks for your response, --scott

Trying to blacklist the driver, with the hopes of installing some new or different driver after boot. I can't seem to blacklist the offending module though. I've tried adding a line to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist for snd_hda_codec but for some reason it still loads...

Also tried to blacklist cx88_alsa as described here:
http://mysettopbox.tv/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=84896&highlight=blacklist#84896
just to see if it happened to be the same problem but no dice.

Any thoughts on how to get this driver to stop loading?

One of the threads above also mentions a kernel patch. I suppose a last resort would be to patch and recompile the kernel. Or maybe get a cheapo USB soundcard from newegg (~$25) until the bug eventually gets patched into a later kernel. Any other options I'm missing?

Someone mentioned about renaming a particular kernel module to stop it loading.

Bruce S.

_________________
Updated 2019/10/26: AthlonII X2 265 Gigabyte GA-970A-DS3P
16Gb PC 1866 DDR3, 500GB+2TB+4TB SATA HDD,
SATA DVD-RW Asus DRW-24D5MT , NVIDIA GeForce GT1080
Hauppauage Nova-T 500, Nova-T LinHes R8.6.1

right, I had tried that but couldn't find a file called snd-hda-codec. after reading your post, however, i remembered that some files actually have these things called extensions. der. anyway I found snd-hda-codec.ko and renamed it, thus allowing me to boot. I guess now if i can get another driver going or something or perhaps find a way to invoke alsa then i'll be good to go.

just for point of reference I tried a couple other things as well, such as:
recompiling latest version of alsa drivers (1.0.14rc4), various alsa module options as discussed here
passing acpi=off noapic to kernel as discussed here

so far no luck... There seems to be a similar problem w/ intel audio sets that use the same realtek phy so that's why i referenced the above urls. Anyway I'll post any discoveries I make...

ok that didn't work... I was able to successfully blacklist the offending driver (even though it says snd_hda_codec caused a panic, snd-hda-codec is what actually has to be on the blacklist), download the realtek driver from here and install but no dice. The kernel still panics while filling /dev. This is likely because the realtek driver is just a customized version of alsa 1.0.9.

At this point I'm starting to think about giving up and getting a new mobo that matches the reference platform more closely. I'll try the kernel patch first though as a last resort.

This sucks. I guess compiling a new kernel is currently over my head. I can do it successfully using various tutorials, but the kernel inevitably crashes and burns when I try to actually use it.

On top of that, there doesn't appear to be any microATX mobo options besides the geforce 6100 chipset that fit my processor (socket 754). At least none on newegg anyway.

anybody have any ideas on the easiest possible way to get the latest kernel going? Do I have to compile or are there precompiled binaries out there that will work? I found some here but they had some initrd weirdness when I tried to use one. Anyone know if these ~should work? Or am I wasting my time with this direction?

Thanks, --scott

OK I got things working (finally!). I guess recompiling the kernel wasn't over my head, thanks largely to this post.

I ended up using the above instructions to compile a vanilla 2.6.21.6 kernel, with assistance from this URL for newer kernel configurations (as more and more modules get rolled into the kernel).

Also after I got the kernel to boot I couldn't get sound to come out despite the volume being up, which was resolved by doing to following:

I think what was basically happening as the system was defaulting to digital audio out instead of analog. The above option disables digital out more or less. Not elegant but works for me.

BTW For all those at my experience level you can check for audio output devices with

So anyway there it is. I think I may do Tier 2 post so if anyone ends up down this same road keep a look out there for helpful hints. Thanks again Bruce for pointing me down the right path.