Hi,
> I read the i810 Howto by Shanu on his website. What I want to know is how
> well does the onboard sound work with linux. I am being offered a chance to
> change my S3 trio + yamaha opl3 Sax for an i810.
Well, the graphics works wonderfully, and is very stable. The
sound part is fuzzy though. I have an 810 at home, and several identical
dell machines (based on 810) at office. On the dell boxes the sound is
recognised as Ensonique audio PCI 64, and works fine. At home, its a plain
810, with a crystal semiconductor cs-4299 audio codec as front end.
I have been trying to get this home box to sing for a while now.
I have tried the alsa drivers (they have an 8x0 driver in cvs) almost
every two/three days. But it doesn't work. Last two weeks or so, I have
dived into the sources for alsa drivers and have zeroed on to the cause of
the problem. Some how the codec ready bit is not set in the ICH global
status register (offset 0x30 on 810, pci bus 0, device 31h, function 5,
base address 2 - referred to as NABMBAR in intel 810 docs). I am still
fighting with it. If you try reading any of the mixer registers, it just
freezes the machine hard. I think the problem is somewhere in the power
management part or loss of sync on the ac97 link coupling 810 and cs-4299.
In short, your milage may vary. Before you swap, make sure that
the sound card is recognised by sndconfig or whatever. There seems to be
some variety in the 8x0 based boards as regards sound - I have seen plain
8x0 sound circuitry, ensonique audio pci 64 compatible (our dell boxes),
creative soundblaster compatible (from a friend) sound stuff on i810 based
boards. So tread carefully.
Regards,
Kedar.
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