Mandrake 9.0 and i810_audio
 

I was wondering if anyone could help me figure out the cause of a bug I'm experiencing on Mandrake 9.0.

To give a little bit of history, after upgrading to a new motherboard, I reinstalled Mandrake 9.0 so that I wouldn't have to manually configure my hardware. Everything went fine, except for the soundcard installation.

After playing with soundcard drivers quite extensively, I managed to come up with a solution, but I'm not sure why it works. In order to get my soundcard to work, I have to let Mandrake initialize the i810_audio driver normally. At the end of my /etc/rc.local script, I have to use rmmod to remove all soundcard related modules, use modprobe to load the latest ALSA drivers, use rmmod to remove all soundcard related modules (again) and then use modprobe to reinitialize the i810_audio driver. Executing these steps (and in this specific order) causes my soundcard to work normally.

My main question is why does this work? I've examind the processes using "ps aux" and the modules using "lsmod" and nothing seems to be different from the before I start this process and when I finish it. Could there be a bug in the initialization of the i810_audio driver? I've temporarily moved to RedHat 8 due to this and one other severe bug in Mandrake.

If someone could help me out, I'd truly appreciate it. Thanks.

I'm not sure why you have that problem exactly but I have a similar one. I need to reload the alsa drivers for my soundcard after they first got loaded at boot (cs46xx). If you use alsa, I'd recommend to check the alsa-user mailinglist and maybe post your question there. People there are nice and really helpful. Maybe someone knows or maybe the problem was even discussed already (check the archives).