[pulseaudio-discuss] Dealing with the PC speaker sound output via ALSA, aka snd-pcsp

[Luke Yelavich]

Greetings all,
Ubuntu intrepid will be shipping kernel version 2.6.27, and alsa 1.0.17. However, for some reason which I am not really sure of yet, our kernel team have enabled snd-pcsp, and disabled pcspkr, resulting in the PC speakerbeing available for audio output. We have also added relevant options to ensure that snd-pcsp is not the first card, however when pulseaudio loads, hal lists the PC speaker device first, causing pulseaudio to use it as the default sink, unless the user has configuration present that states otherwise.

At the moment, I have patched the hal module to prevent the PC speaker being available as a sink, however from arguments put to me, the PC speaker being available as a sink *MAY* be useful at times.

Attempting to look at this from an upstream's point of view, I think it would be better to patch the hal module to enable the PC speaker as a sink option, but after all other sinks have been set up, ensuring that the PC speaker sink will only be used if the user requests it. However, you may well want to blacklist it entirely.

So I'm interested in people's thoughts on the matter. If Lennart thinks its worth changing something along either these two lines, I'm happy to send a patch through.

Thanks for your time.

Luke
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