Re: [LAD] Problem with recent hdspm, alsactl and systemd

Hello all,

I wonder if any other users have experienced this problem and how they handled it. This has occured three times when doing an fresh Archlinux install on a system using the RME MADI cards. There seems to be something in the combination of recent versions of the driver and alsactl that leads to alsactl freezing when the configured (external) clock source for the card is not available. The 'freeze' seems to be quite deep: it's impossible to kill the process (even while that process is still a child of e.g. the xterm from which it was launched, and not of PID 1). Any other process trying to access the sound card (e.g. jackd) hangs in the same way. This also means that when doing a poweroff or reboot systemd will hang on the 'alsactl store' service, and the only option is a power cycle. An added difficulty when trying to resolve this (things will be OK once you have the correct /var/lib/alsa/asound.state) is that recent systemd doesn't allow to disable or enable the alsa store/ restore services easily (why not ?), you have to manually edit some symlinks in order to do that.

Note: if this happens to be a driver problem, please do NOT revert to the ancient behaviour of silently changing the clock source to 'internal' when the external clock is not available. I DO still expect to see opening the device fail if the external clock isn't present, as has been the case for some time. The thing that shouldn't happen is that alsactl chokes on this condition - it didn't before so it shouldn't have to. Ciao,