nVidia nForce4 audio "MCP51 High Definition Audio"

[Anthem]

After a hours of searching and trying various things, I finally got my on-board audio to work.

The board is an MSI nForce4 with on-board audio. The motherboard box says the audio card is a RealTek ALC880, but lspci reports it as "nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)"

What didn't work:
Trying to find something in the kernel
In the kernel, if my card were supported, I expected I'd find some kind of nVidia reference. However, the only ALSA card that mentions nVidia in the 2.6.15 kernel is an AC97 card. lspci didn't call it an AC97, so unsurprisingly, this didn't work.

nVidia's binary drivers
I tried nVidia's binary OSS drivers (NFORCE-Linux-x86_64-1.0-0310-pkg1.run), but 'modprobe nvsound' didn't create any device nodes with udev. Nothing indicated any kind of failure, so I kept trying. After realizing this was a dead-end, I moved on to:

RealTek's drivers
Since the MB docs claimed I had a RealTek card, I tried their binary drivers. I had some luck, but alsamixer wouldn't start. I realized it was using the snd_hda_intel module, and being that I like doing my kernels the manual way, I tracked this down as Intel HD Audio and compiled it into the kernel. I had the same problem as with the RealTek drivers -- alsamixer wouldn't start. I had to try something else.

What worked:
I found this: http://gentoo-wiki.com/HARDWARE_Clevo_M38AW#Audio_with_ALSA

It was meant for a different board than mine, but I thought maybe it could help. I recompiled my kernel with snd_hda_intel as a module instead of built-in, and added the model=5stack line to modules.autoload.d. It worked!

The controls shown in alsamixer aren't quite what I'm used it, since I've almost always used Creative products, but I unmuted and turned up the levels on PCM, Front, Surround, Center and Side, and I can now clearly hear my audio.

The trick was getting out of the idea that I needed some kind of nVidia-specific driver, and then to figure out what kind of chipset it really used.

Hope this helps some of you out there!

[Anthem]

Oh, also, if you stop and restart the alsasound init script after the initial module load, you may need to rmmod and modprobe snd_hda_intel again, explicitly adding the model=5stack parameter.

I don't advise doing this, however. At least once, stopping alsasound has caused a kernel panic while unloading the module.

[pianosaurus]

Thanks! Now at least I have some sound.

But:
Mplayer hangs after a few frames of playback. If I compile it with USE=rtc, it freezes right away. It doesn't if I unload the module, so I blame it.
XMMS plays, but there's a lot of noise.

Haven't tried anything else yet, as I just got my system up and running. Do you have any of these problems?
_________________
PKA Cuber
Please add [SOLVED] to the subject of your original post when you feel that your problem is resolved.
Adopt an unanswered post

[lucapost]

http://xopen.dyndns.org/linux/v6024ea/

Another brick...

[lucapost]

This is my kernel