system hangs during boot when using ALSA

sharky44 · n00b Joined: 13 Jul 2002 Posts: 48 Location: USA

Hi. I've recently installed Gentoo on my IBM Thinkpad A22m.

I followed the instructions on the Desktop Configuration guide for setting up ALSA. Everything seemed to go fine.

I had to recompile the kernel since I had compiled in support for my sound card initially, but I took that out, and now it's just soundcore support. Ok.

I emerged alsa-driver, configured /etc/modules.autoload and /etc/modules.d/aliases for my sound card. It's a Cirrus Logic CS4614, so I used the cs46xx drivers. Ok.

I rebooted so all that would take effect. Ok. Worked fine.

Then I emerged alsa-utilities, un-muted the volume, etc.

THEN -- "rc-update add alsasound boot"

Now, when I reboot, it freezes at this point:
* Initialising ALSA.... [ok]
* Starting sound driver: cs46xx

HANGS!

The only way I know how to get my computer to boot again was to boot from Install CD, mount my harddrive and go: "rc-update del alsasound boot"

Then it boots OK. Alsa seems to work OK once I unmute the volume after each reboot (How would you know if it's really working?) Because I also noticed an oddity:

# /etc/init.d/alsasound start
* ALSA driver is already running.
# /etc/init.d/alsasound status
* status: stopped
# /etc/init.d/alsasound stop
* ERROR: "alsasound" has not yet been started.
# /etc/init.d/alsasound start
* ALSA driver is already running.
# /etc/init.d/alsasound status
* status: stopped

I can recreate this anytime.

What would be causing the system to hang at boot? Obviously ALSA, but why? Any ideas?

Thanks in advance for your help! I searched google & forums.gentoo.org for quite a while with no luck, so please point me to another forum if this issue has been addressed already, and if that is the case, I apologize for wasting valuable forum space :-)

delta407 · Posted: Sun Jul 14, 2002 7:48 pm Post subject:

Moving to Hardware forum...
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w00kie · n00b Joined: 16 Jun 2002 Posts: 18 Location: Paris, France

I get the same thing with the intel8x0 driver
have you found a solution???

kybber · Posted: Thu Jul 18, 2002 12:15 pm Post subject:

My laptop occasionally hangs during boot at the same point. But that's only like every 4 or 5 times. My soundcard is a Maestro 3. The solution for me is simply to hit the powerbutton to reboot. It is still annoying so I'd be interested in a solution too, if you find one.

pludo · n00b Joined: 18 Jul 2002 Posts: 6

My laptop does that all the time now, too... with the intel8x0 driver. Any idea how to fix it?

w00kie · n00b Joined: 16 Jun 2002 Posts: 18 Location: Paris, France

now I'm running without alsasound in my boot runlevel and my sound modules in modules.autoload
oddly enough, ALSA works just fine even though it was never started
I just have to do an alsactl restore to get my volume back to my preferred settings

[edit]
nope, in fact alsactl restore hangs my machine :roll:

I've got to restore my sound levels by hand
[/edit]

BonezTheGoon · Posted: Thu Jul 18, 2002 1:56 pm Post subject:

I'm not sure, since none of you specify, whether you are aware that you need to refer to the ALSA drivers (modules) as snd-(insert_module_name_here).

So for the intel8x0 module it becomes snd-intel8x0

for the cs46xx module it becomes snd-cs46xx. This should also be used when referring to the card in the /etc/modules.d/aliases.

It would appear that some of you must have the correct driver given you (w00kie) hear sounds, however others may not know this little gotcha of ALSA.

Hope that helps someone, anyone.

Regards,
BonezTheGoon

w00kie · n00b Joined: 16 Jun 2002 Posts: 18 Location: Paris, France

yes
I do use snd_intel8x0 and have the 8 aliases in my /etc/modules.d/aliases

btw, my kernel is compiled with soundcore as a module and no other drivers
my modules.autoload looks like this (only showing you the sound related modules)

Tuna · Guru Joined: 19 Jul 2002 Posts: 485 Location: Berlin

i have the same problem here.. manuallly loaded all the drives as told in the dektop guide worked pretty well. After first boot it hangs again exactly here..

* Starting sound driver: Ali5451

so.. as you can see.. different driver as the other people here (snd_ali5451)
but again.. a laptop...
either were all doing the same mistake here.. or we have a serious bug.
would be nice if someone could look into that.

thx

w00kie · n00b Joined: 16 Jun 2002 Posts: 18 Location: Paris, France

I'm on a laptop too
DELL Inspiron 8200

ledents · n00b Joined: 15 Jul 2002 Posts: 7

I have got the same problem also but I am NOT running on a portable
(although I did buildin APM support into the kernel. don't know if it has to do with that?).
My sound card is also a cs46xx and I did some investigation and found
that the '/etc/init.d/alsasound start' was hanging on 'alsactl'.
I don't know how to fix it but whenever calling:
alsactl -f /etc/asound.state restore
the machine will hang.
By the way this problem is also mentioned on another forum.
(no fix available their neither!)

cbrese · Posted: Wed Jul 31, 2002 3:51 pm Post subject: hack

I just had the same problem my hack to fix it was to edit /etc/init.d/alsasound and comment out the part where it tries to reload the mixer setting and then I added the 2 amixer unmute commands from the desktop config guide.

It seems to be working good now.

ealfert · Posted: Thu Aug 01, 2002 8:58 pm Post subject:

cbrese...thanks for the workaround! I'm going to give more detail to your solution for the benefit of other newbies like me that need everything spelled out.

I just tried getting my sound to work on an ibm thinkpad t22 with snd-cs46xx driver and everything worked until i rebooted...then the system hanged at the same spot as y'all.

I WAS FORCED TO USE W2KPRO to search this forumn for an answer.

I booted the gentoo install cd and mounted the root partition...
edited /etc/init.d/alsasound
jumped to line 85 and commented it out...then inserted the following..

chr1z · Apprentice Joined: 17 Jul 2002 Posts: 207

i had the same problem
too bad i did not wait until i read this ;>
atm i'm reinstalling gentoo :lol:

ptheborg · Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2002 7:30 pm Post subject:

My laptop config suffered from a similar problem. Besides the hang problem during booting, amixer didn't work. It gives an Assertion in simple.c and simply Aborts, so unmuting the channels manually during booting was no solution for me.
At this point ALSA was getting really on my nerves, but I didn't give up

Then suddenly I got the idea to check the portage dir of alsa and discovered that I had installed 0.9.0-rc2 but there was a 0.9.0-rc1-r7 too. So I tried that ebuild script and it worked right from the start. NO hanging problems and amixer worked also as it should.

So I don't know for sure but I guess rc2 has still some bugs....???
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ealfert · Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2002 7:37 pm Post subject:

i just checked /var/tmp/portage and i only have alsa-driver-0.9.0_rc2 not rc7

doing a emerge -s alsa only shows rc2

next time an update world upgrades alsa, i'll uncomment the workaround and see if the system still hangs on boot.
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ptheborg · Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2002 7:49 pm Post subject:

Hmmm, it's getting stranger every second... :S
Anyway, I'm very sure that the rc1-r7 is still there, even the 0.5XX ebuild script resides in that dir.

Have you tried an emerge rsync followed by an emerge clean ??
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ealfert · Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2002 8:04 pm Post subject:

i took your suggestion and did an emerge rsync then an emerge clean....and then my heart stopped...i say a HUGE list of packages that were being removed...for a second there i thought it was wiping out my entire harddrive...

after it finished...i did a man emerge and read up on the clean argument.... i'm glad it only removes packages that are no longer needed...i hope it doesn't make mistakes and this is true...

then i did an emerge -s alsa.... and once again...i only see rc2 only....

no problem here .... the workaround is working.... i'll just wait for the next official update to alsa and then remove the workaround... if it works....great... if not, i'll just install the workaround again...
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ptheborg · Posted: Fri Aug 02, 2002 8:24 pm Post subject:

Gheh, oh....ehm, sorry for that. But AFAIK emerge clean only removes not used outdated packages from the portage tree. Note: Remember to backup any modifications you've made to the portage tree by yourself....cause these will be gone...

But still very weird no alsa-driver-0.9.0-rc1-r7 shows up in your portage tree....very very weird, but maybe the rc1-r7 ebuild script is removed from the portage in an portage tree updated that occured last night. This would explain why I'm still having that script in the portage, simply because I have emerged that version.
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sharky44 · n00b Joined: 13 Jul 2002 Posts: 48 Location: USA

I tried the workaround suggested by cbrese, and thanks to ealfert for clarification. Anyway, alsa loads fine on boot! Yaay!

It seems to me that enough people have had difficulties that this situation might be worth a mention in the Gentoo Documentation?

BTW, I am using alsa-driver 0.9.0-rc2; I did not try 0.9.0-rc1-r7 as ptheborg suggested. The fact that 0.9.0-rc2 has a couple issues like this might be worth mentioning in the Gentoo docs as well.

Anyway, thanks for the help.

ptheborg · Posted: Tue Aug 06, 2002 11:17 am Post subject:

why upgrading to a later version that is broken.......???

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BonezTheGoon · Posted: Thu Nov 14, 2002 4:56 am Post subject:

I just gave myself this problem. I had been using my onboard sound (snd-intel8x0) and finally bought a card. So I changed my config to use the snd-cs46xx for my new PCI card. Everything was fine until I rebooted. It appears (thanks to cbrese's clue) that the problem for me was that the /etc/init.d/alsasound was loading the old values for my onboard sound and trying to get them to work for my new card. I looked into the /etc/init.d/alsasound file and found that the file it was referencing was /etc/asound.state -- I also noticed that it checks to see if this file exists. So I just deleted the /etc/asound.state and reboot. Then everything was FINE! Thanks cbrese!

Regards,
BonezTheGoon

amanset · Posted: Thu Nov 14, 2002 12:44 pm Post subject:

amanset · Posted: Thu Nov 14, 2002 6:12 pm Post subject:

Sorted out my problem, some corruption in the file at the beginning.

The sound still doesn't work though...

BonezTheGoon · Posted: Fri Nov 15, 2002 11:16 pm Post subject: