[linux-audio-user] my live CD dilemma

[Mark Knecht]

Paul Winkler wrote:
> I have the cursed Neomagic 256 AV in my old Dell CPI-A.
> I found that with Alsa, the system had a roughly 60% chance
> of total lockup when loading the driver.
> 
> I had some back-and-forth email with Takashi which resulted
> in some patches that made the driver less likely to freeze the
> system, and at one point it was down to maybe a 10% chance of lockup.
> But later releases of ALSA made it much worse again.
> Eventually I gave up... I don't run audio on that laptop anymore :-(
> 
> On the random occasions that it managed to load, the driver worked fine :-\
> 

This sounds like my experience with the cursed RME HDSP9652 before I 
finally gave up. I didn't have the lockups. The machine just didn't load 
the driver 90% of the time. The 10% of the time it did load it worked fine.

It had been much better in earlier version of Alsa and earlier kernels, 
loading and working (sort of) 100% of the time, but then finally got so 
bad it wasn't worth the time spent to make it work...

- Mark