Hey ho. Back in November, a stranger in a dark car promised me candy if I would upgrade my NEC Versa P520 BIOS. Naturally, I accepted. I mean, who wouldn't? I upgraded the BIOS using a download from the NEC site. The upgrade screwed up, so that I couldn't roll it back. Naturally.
After that time, I started to get "semaphore" errors regularly. It took me some time to deduce that the error started with the BIOS upgrade, since I had also upgraded the OS at the same time (from Slackware 9.0 to Slackware 9.1, which means from the OSS sound drivers to Alsa). Now, I've used Alsa in the past, so I was happy to be using it out of the box, but once I saw these errors, I considered that the problem was with the Alsa drivers. It wasn't. Going back to OSS drivers didn't help. Upgrading Alsa to the latest release didn't help. Upgrading to the 2.6.0 and then 2.6.3 kernel didn't help. The sound card is still flaky, and I have no means of rolling back the BIOS (I've written NEC, but I doubt they will help at all -- past experience suggests that they aren't the most helpful crew in the world). What happens? At boot time, sometimes the alsa modules fail to load. I get a message to the effect that the sound card is not ready or something similar, but I don't have an example of that message at hand, sorry. Other times, the card starts up fine. It plays for a while, often with sound (say, from a CD) a bit choppy. Then, after a while, it just stops, with the message Feb 25 09:27:09 euclid kernel: ALSA sound/pci/intel8x0.c:591: codec_write 0: sem aphore is not ready for register 0x2c Feb 25 09:27:09 euclid kernel: ALSA sound/pci/intel8x0.c:607: codec_read 0: sema phore is not ready for register 0x2c in /var/log/syslog. The error condition is unpredictable, as far as I can tell. I decided recently to give the bleeding edge a try, because I really want this stinking soundcard to work. So I downloaded and compiled the alsa driver, library, etc. and installed them. However, I can't modprobe snd-card-0. I get the following errors. Feb 24 21:51:21 euclid kernel: snd: Unknown symbol vscnprintf Feb 24 21:51:21 euclid kernel: snd_seq_device: Unknown symbol snd_info_register Feb 24 21:51:21 euclid kernel: snd_seq_device: Unknown symbol snd_info_create_mo dule_entry Feb 24 21:51:21 euclid kernel: snd_seq_device: Unknown symbol snd_info_free_entr y The list goes on, but I assume the real problem is just the first error. Subsequent errors (I guess) are caused by the failure to load the snd module. Am I missing something in my kernel? What's vscnprintf? I'm using the 2.6.3 kernel. Surely that's recent enough? Thanks much for any help you can provide. -- Jesse F. Hughes "And I'm one of my own biggest skeptics as I had *YEARS* of wrong ideas, and attempts that failed. Worse, for some of them it took *MONTHS* before I figured out where I screwed up." -- James Harris ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net is sponsored by: Speed Start Your Linux Apps Now. Build and deploy apps & Web services for Linux with a free DVD software kit from IBM. Click Now! http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=1356&alloc_id=3438&op=click _______________________________________________ Alsa-user mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/alsa-user
