I'm trying to qualify some new hardware for an image. We want the same image to be applied to old hardware and new, yet the new hardware needs the default card set to card 1 and the old hardware needs the default set to card 0 in alsa.conf to work. Can this be setup in the config file to detect or support both possible options?

Thanks

Lemme add some information:
/proc/asound/cards on the new hardware:
0 [Intel ]: HDA-Intel -HDA Intel
HDA Intel at 0xf7c34000 irq 16
1 [Intel_1 ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel
HDA Intel at 0xf7c30000 irq 22

Old hardware /proc/asound/cards:
0 [Intel ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel
HDA Intel at 0xfc520000 irq 16

lspci on the new hardware for the audio devices:

00:03.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device 0c0c (rev 06)
Subsystem: Lenovo Device 309f
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 16
Memory at f7c34000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [60] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit- Count=1/1 Enable-
Capabilities: [70] Express Root Complex Integrated Endpoint, MSI 00
Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation Device 8c20 (rev 04)
Subsystem: Lenovo Device 309f
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 22
Memory at f7c30000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 2
Capabilities: [60] Message Signalled Interrupts: Mask- 64bit+ Count=1/1 Enable-
Capabilities: [70] Express Root Complex Integrated Endpoint, MSI 00
Capabilities: [100] Virtual Channel <?>
Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel

/usr/share/alsa/alsa.conf:
Old system uses
defaults.ctl.card 0
defaults.pcm.card 0

New system to get sound working i had to change this to
defaults.ctl.card 1
defaults.pcm.card 1

I've been trying to make indexing of the cards work by adding a /etc/modprobe.d/alsa.conf file but since both cards use the same name, I'm not sure how to identify the vid or pid to use.

I've tried a few more things, so wanted to update.

I've tried options snd slots=,snd_hda_intel which does swap the order of the load on the new system, unfortunately this also breaks the old system for some reason.

the vid= and pid= options are not valid on my version of alsa/linux/modprobe, getting an error trying to load the alsa.conf file in the modprobe.d directory.

Mostly the problem is that both sound cards use the same name and drivers so the options to alias the cards does not seem possible in this case.

So update the kernel. With any recent-ish distro, you might be able to do this by just installing a new kernel from your package repo, or in almost all cases you will be able to compile from source. See here for a solution that requires the vid= and pid= options. This is the simplest way to do it.

Exactly. So compile a new kernel and use index=

Found a workaround.

We set a udev rule defining the sound card i wanted the system to use by its bus (which is the same on all of the hardware we are verifying it works on), which let us give it an id that we then used in alsa.conf to define the default card.

I know we could have updated the kernel, but we were going for as minimal changes as possible to the image. we have to go through a lot more testing and verification to do a suse update. As it is with this change, i just need to change 4 files.

Thanks for the help.