Modprobe doesn't like snd_hda_intel

mittfh · 06-23-2012, 08:50 AM

(Mageia 2 - full system info in attached alsa-info.txt)

After a routine update the other day, my sound (ALSA rather than Pulse) suddenly stopped working - analysis indicated my system had decided it wanted to use my USB webcam as the default sound device. Putting my sound card as the default device in .asoundrc and rebooting didn't appear to have any effect, so on a whim I downloaded and installed the latest drivers (Realtek Linux Audiopack 5.17). Except that even though the compilation and installation seemed to go without a hitch, while MCC --> Hardware --> Sound tells me it's using snd_hda_intel (as expected), aplay -L and aplay -l inform me I haven't got any sound cards installed...

Code:

[ben@BlackBox ~]$ aplay -L
null
    Discard all samples (playback) or generate zero samples (capture)
pulse
    PulseAudio Sound Server

Code:

[ben@BlackBox ~]$ aplay -l
aplay: device_list:252: no soundcards found...

Among the standard troubleshooting steps, lsmod indicates that snd_hda_intel isn't loaded, but modprobe fails...

Code:

[ben@BlackBox ~]$ sudo modprobe -a snd_hda_intel
ERROR: could not insert 'snd_hda_intel': Invalid argument

The relevant dmesg output is included in the attached file. I've also run the commands Mageia suggests to troubleshoot audio, and saved the output to troubleshoot.txt

brianL · 06-23-2012, 09:00 AM

Have you tried running alsaconf, as root?

mittfh · 06-23-2012, 11:31 AM

Unfortunately...

Code:

No supported PnP or PCI card found.

Would you like to probe legacy ISA sound cards/chips? (Y)

Probing legacy ISA cards might make your system unstable.
Do you want to proceed? (Y)

No legacy drivers are available.

mittfh · 06-25-2012, 03:39 PM

Update: by way of experimentation short of a complete in-place reinstall, I tried uninstalling task-xfce4 then reinstalling it (task-xfce4 being a metapackage which installs everything the Mageia developers think is needed to run xfce), not really expecting it to do anything...

...but it's solved the sound issue (yay!) - not quite sure how but it's worked, so who am I to complain or delve deeper into the whys and whatnots...

mittfh · 07-05-2012, 01:52 AM

About a week later, following a reboot, sound suddenly stopped working again. Immediately before the reboot, it was working fine. It's the same issue as before: no sound cards detected, dmesg reporting problems inserting snd-hda-intel (except this time it's also decided it doesn't like rawmidi).

So far I've tried forced in-place reinstalls (urpmi --replacepkgs) of alsa-* (since for obvious reasons alsa can't be uninstalled - at least not via the graphical tools), kernel-desktop, kernel-firmware-nonfree and even task-xfce4 (albeit as that's a metapackage I had to uninstall / reinstall it) - no joy.

I attach the results of alsa-info and a script I wrote based on the commands Mageia recommends for troubleshooting sound issues. Understandably, I'd like to avoid the nuclear solution of [ backup / wipe / reinstall / restore ] if possible