/dev/dsp is missing, but sound still works (except in virtualization)
 

I'm running Slackware current (as of 01/08/2008, anyway) with kernel 2.6.23.12-smp on a Dell XPS m1330 laptop.

Sound works great, no problems on the host machine.

However, both in QEMU and in VMWare, no sound device can be detected on the host machine because /dev/dsp doesn't exist (and it doesn't, I checked).

Now, I know that /dev/dsp is most often a symbolic link to something like /dev/sound/dsp or /dev/snd/dsp... but neither of those exist either.

Since /dev/dsp doesn't exist, I assume I need to make a symlink to something for it, but what?

I'm not even sure how sound is working since those are the only two things I know to look for. I've never run into this in any other Slackware environment (I'm running Slackware 12 on another machine and /dev/dsp is linked to /dev/sound/dsp like I would expect). Do you think this might be because of weird hardware (because this is a laptop) or is this perhaps something being done different in this kernel that I'm not aware of?

Any advice?

Here is what I have:
$ ls -l /dev |grep dsp
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 2008-03-02 20:29 adsp -> sound/adsp
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 2008-03-02 20:29 dsp -> sound/dsp

/dev/dsp is used by the deprecated OSS. If you want, you can use the OSS emulation provided by alsa by using the snd-pcm-oss module. Run:
and see if it helps.

Regards

Hey, that worked! Thanks! :)