[SOLVED] no [AMD/ATI] Raven/Raven2/Fenghuang sound in openSUSE 15.1 or 15.2 Alpha

mrmazda · 02-06-2020, 11:56 PM

This is an already installed on HD system from a dead 5 year old AMD motherboard/CPU/APU migrating to new parts from AMD, Asus, Corsair and EVGA. It's not mine, and I didn't choose the motherboard. It's owner is 95% blind and I'm the one who admins it when necessary, typically once or twice a year. When his old one died his wife rushed him to Best Buy without any input from me, and they bought what was in stock.

Booting openSUSE 15.1 and 15.2 Alpha and Debian Buster and reconfiguring for the changed MAC address was no problem. Even openSUSE 42.3 and 13.1 boot with no (required) changes other than 70-persistent-net.rules. Getting X to work was handled in a thread on forums.opensuse.org. The YaST sound module accomplished nothing. https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:Audio_troubleshooting looks so out of date it's almost scary, much like 5 years ago.

Code:

> inxi -SAxx
System:    Host: Easystreet Kernel: 5.3.18-lp152.3-default x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 7.5.0 Desktop: KDE 3 wm: kwin
           dm: N/A Distro: openSUSE Leap 15.1
Audio:     Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Raven/Raven2/Fenghuang HDMI/DP Audio driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel
           bus ID: 08:00.1 chip ID: 1002:15de
           Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Family 17h HD Audio vendor: ASUSTeK driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel
           bus ID: 08:00.6 chip ID: 1022:15e3
           Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.3.18-lp152.3-default

alsa-info.txt is at 15.1 and 15.2.
Links to: lspci and lspci -vv

I know there's a cmdline initialization command I want to try, but its name is apparently in a memory black hole, as is the name of the SLE dev who got me through a similar ordeal several years ago. Neither alsactl nor aplay seem to be the right one. I know it's in a bug report I at least commented several years ago, but bugzilla.opensuse.org is behaving horribly slowly whenever I try to search it (unless it's a saved search).

It really would be nice to get (HDMI only) audio working without another 20 hours of searching and experimenting. The PC is virtually useless to its owner without sound, as he mostly uses it for finding and playing talking books. Anyone here familiar with getting Raven/Raven2/Fenghuang sound working in any distro?

mrmazda · 02-07-2020, 05:52 PM

Seems what I really need is a comprehensible generic HDMI audio HOWTO with lots of examples, as even with two years and older Intel hardware and other distros besides openSUSE, most of my many installations and users are not producing any HDMI audio output. This includes Mint 19.3/XFCE, Ubuntu 18.04/TDE, Debian 10/TDE and Fedora 31/IceWM.

The only one working so far is on a Kaby Lake GigaByte with i3-7100T and 8086:a2f0 audio device (Intel 200 Series PCH HD Asus Audio), Debian 10 as normal user, but not as root user. In same PC not working are openSUSE Tumbleweed & 15.0 & 15.2 & Ubuntu 18.04 (neither root nor normal user, aplay pretends to work), and openSUSE 15.1 (neither root nor normal user; aplay audio open error).

mrmazda · 02-08-2020, 02:10 PM

Solved by disabling non-HDMI/DisplayPort outputs in pavucontrol.

I'd still like to know how to solve this from cmdline or without involving pulseaudio, and whether HDMI without any of pulseaudio is even possible.