Arch: 486 Hardware: ISA sound card described as "ESS ES1868 Plug and Play AudioDrive" Driver: sound/isa/es18xx.c in mainline 2.6.27.2 kernel aplay of a 44.1 kHz wav file gets stuck playing a 1/4 or 1/2 second loop at the beginning. Source code comments include, "Support for 16 bit DMA seems to be broken." Reverting to commented-out code as described in the similar story at http://osdir.com/ml/debian.ports.alpha/2003-06/msg00105.html did not help. Reducing the wav file to 8 bit samples and mono sound only made the loop longer. See also, bug 10214.
Is this a regression? Did any earlier kernel work OK? If so, which version(s)? Thanks.
I have no prior experience with this sound card, so to answer your question I will test various kernels. It would help me if you could send me, or give me the command syntax to retrieve, the commit history of sound/isa/es18xx.c. I will also test OSS if no working ALSA version is found. Thanks. The card works well under DOS using the manufacturer's PnP configurator.
I ran into operational problems booting the kernel before I found a version that works. Kernels 2.6.27.3 and 2.6.27.2 were compiled with gcc-4.3.2. All older kernels were compiled with gcc 4.2.3. Configs are available on request. 2.6.27.3, 2.6.27.2, 2.6.16.62: ALSA loops sound as previously described. 2.6.16: Diff on es18xx.c versus 2.6.16.62 shows only change was a fix for a memory leak. Did not test. 2.6.15.7, 2.6.14.7, 2.6.13.5: Unbootable, stopped after "Freeing unused kernel memory." Remains responsive to Shift-PageUp and Ctrl-Alt-Del but otherwise appears hung. 2.6.12.6: Unbootable, hung after detecting keyboard. Detection of keyboard was reported twice. Once hung is completely unresponsive to keyboard. 2.6.27.3 (OSS): There is no ESS module in OSS. The sb module works for 1-30 s then the system locks up with HDD LED on. PC-DOS with C:\ESSCFG.EXE /A:220 /I:5 /D:1 /E:0 /B:300 : Works. Linux PnP configurator chooses the same port (220), IRQ (5), and dma1 (1); however, dma2=3 and mpu_port=330.
Closing as obsolete, if this is incorrect please re-open against a recent kernel