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These messages appear only on the boot screen and not
in dmesg, messages, debug, syslog, etc.
These appear right at the time rc.modules is loaded and
parsed (following the trail of things which occur within rc.S)
but the only modules (aside from my NIC) which load from
here are:
0 [8235 ]: VIA8233 - VIA 8235
VIA 8235 at 0xdc00, irq 5
I only have an integrated soundcard (ac97) on a VIA 8233
chipset. I cannot find where these modprobe commands are
coming from, although cat /proc/asound/timers reveals:
in your alsa config file there will be all those entries, if you only have one sound card, remove the offending lines. mine is in /etc/modules.s/alsa but gentoo puts things in different places...
Apparently /etc/rc.d/init.d/alsasound is the startup script and the
'start ()' function appears to be the offender:
function start() {
#
# insert all sound modules
#
drivers=`/sbin/modprobe -c | \
grep -E "^[[:space:]]*alias[[:space:]]+snd-card-[[:digit:]]" | \
awk '{print $3}'`
for i in $drivers; do
if [ "$i" != off ]; then
echo -n "Starting sound driver: $i "
/sbin/modprobe $i
echo -e "$rc_done"
fi
done
However if I take this bit of code and try to run it as a separate
script, it appears to run but produces no output. Therefore I
cannot tell if it is causing this bootup output. Maybe it is only
supposed to run at bootup and will produce nothing once
the system is up and running. Any help here appreciated.
An interesting note: /proc/asound contains a symlink 8235 -> card0/
contents of card0/
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:54 ac97#0
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:54 ac97#0regs
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:54 id
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:54 oss_mixer
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 0 May 12 14:54 pcm0c/
dr-xr-xr-x 6 root root 0 May 12 14:54 pcm0p/
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 0 May 12 14:54 pcm1c/
dr-xr-xr-x 3 root root 0 May 12 14:54 pcm1p/
pcm0c:
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:53 info
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:53 oss
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 May 12 14:53 sub0/
pcm0p:
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:53 info
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:53 oss
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 May 12 14:53 sub0/
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 May 12 14:53 sub1/
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 May 12 14:53 sub2/
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 May 12 14:53 sub3/
pcm1c:
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:53 info
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:53 oss
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 May 12 14:53 sub0/
pcm1p:
-r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:53 info
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 0 May 12 14:53 oss
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root root 0 May 12 14:53 sub0/
Is it possible that the subX components are what modprobe is
trying to look for?
As I say, I would really like to know how this is all supposed to
work rather than fishing around for 'magic settings'.
Distribution: Slackware 10, Fedora Core 3, Mac OS X
Posts: 617
Rep:
Quote:
I would really like to remove the modprobe commands where
ever they are coming from and gain a fuller understanding
of just how this all works.
Which commands?
Slackware is different from a lot of distros in that the start up scripts are viscioualy different. rc.modules is a script which runs the required /sbin/modprobe command to load the module similar to if you were given a command prompt and had to load each module manually.
When you run that bit of script yourself, it won't do anything because its checking for anything that is already loaded as a module first (which you showed us with the lsmod command) and anything sound related that isn't there will be started, and those that are there are ignored.
Now, I personally stuffed the whole trying to get slackware to play nice with sysVinit startup scripts and so instead i set up /etc/modules.conf so that when a program wants to use sound, kmod (the automagic module loader) will attempt to load the relevant modules itself.
There should be something on www.alsa-project.org under the documentation link to help with this. Look for their wiki documentation and your card under that.
Here is what my /etc/modules.conf looks like for my sound blaster live value:
Code:
# ALSA portion
alias char-major-116 snd
alias snd-card-0 snd-emu10k1
# module options should go here
# OSS/Free portion
alias char-major-14 soundcore
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
# card #1
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
# OSS/Free portion - card #1
alias sound-slot-0 snd-card-0
alias sound-service-0-0 snd-mixer-oss
alias sound-service-0-1 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-3 snd-pcm-oss
alias sound-service-0-8 snd-seq-oss
alias sound-service-0-12 snd-pcm-oss
With Slackware I've only known rc.modules for loading
kernel modules and of course they are loaded at bootup
and not as needed as I assume kmod does.
When I ran the bit of code from alsasound I did expect to
see the modprobe commands trying to load the snd-card-1-7
since they couldn't have possibly been loaded.
I guess I'll play aund with it a little more and see what I can
see.
Are you sure there isn't a good tutorial around explaining
how the ALSA setup works? I know it's not at ALSA.
No there isn't really a good one unfortunately linked to one their own site which annoys me. I used a multitude of docs from this site http://www.djcj.org/LAU/guide/index.php which is referenced on the alsa-projects documentation website. That and looking at the "souncard matrix" and the alsa wiki for my card eventually I got my set up done. This lack of ease put me off alsa for ages.
The redhat link was only to the ALSA-mini-HOWTO which I had
read but did not feel I got much out of. Thanks for your input,
though.
After reading a bit more about KMOD module autoloading I
took the plunge and entered the ALSA config commands in
modules.conf.
While I don't get the bootup messages anymore, I do get the
old warning about sound drivers not being loaded when I
startup Gnome or KDE. However, this is apparently the trigger
KMOD needs to load the drivers and if I open an xterm and
do an lsmod, there they are and sound does work from then on.
I think I have just substituted one warning message for another
but I suppose I should take heart that with KMOD, memory is
not burdened with additional code until I need it. With that in
mind, I should also probably remove the modules after I have
finished using them. One recommendation for this that I hapened
across suggests the following:
To periodically unload unused modules, put something like the following in root's crontab entry:
0-59/5 * * * * /sbin/rmmod -a
However I think this removes all modules which might be going
a tad too far.
Distribution: Slackware 10, Fedora Core 3, Mac OS X
Posts: 617
Rep:
hmmmm
you shouldn't need to remove modules yourself. Kmod does it for you I think once the module hasn't been removed after a certain period of time.
Quote:
The icing of the cake is that when an automatically installed module
has been unused for a period of time (usually 1 minute), the module
will be automatically removed from the kernel as well.
This is taken from /usr/src/linux/Documentation/modules.txt
Im not sure why they're not being removed properly but you'll have to have a nosy around the documentation and/or www.google.co.uk/linux for more on this. I tend to just compile most things into the kernel itself and sound is almost constantly being played. Its possible that certain programs are constantly keeping the modules alive (possibly a mixer app that is sitting in the "taskbar" of kde/gnome?).
As for the error that you're receiving now about a sound server, this sounds like it might have something to do with kde and gnome's respective sound server programs.
kde=arts
gnome=esd
I don't use these either but you may want to have a look in relation to these programs about how to solve the error. It sounds like they are complaining that they are not being allowed to control the sound, though this is a wild stab in the dark at the problem.
Interestingly enough the "icing on the cake.." quote does
come from modules.txt in the kernel dcoumentation, but it
is talking about 'kerneld' not 'kmod'. Kerneld has, of course,
been largely replaced by kmod and as a blurb from kmod$.txt
indicates:
"The Kmod is not designed to automatically unload modules; .."
I guess Documentation is the last thing to get upgraded and
why it is so full of references to outmoded software, kernels
etc.
As for the error starting up KDE, I just clicked on the button
"Don't show me this again" and decided not to worry about it.
It's sort of six of one - half a dozen to me, and I really don't
worry about how much memory is taken up; I've got 128MB
and never seem to have any trouble. I'm not sure my swap
partition is ever utilized.
The last part of the second quote reads:
".. the potential saving in memory is only marginal for the RAM capacity of computers today; see also /usr/src/linux/Documentation/kmod.txt"
I've never used 'rmmod' before so I was just asking if there
was something I didn't know about and that maybe I was
doing something wrong. No big whup!
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