Problem with broken sound on some ThinkPads
Information about the phenomena of broken sound on some ThinkPad models.
Contents
Dual sound chip problem description
There are two sound chips in these machines, a PCI based Crystal SoundFusion 4610, and an ISA based Crystal SoundFusion 4239.
The Linux drivers for the CS4610 (both OSS and ALSA) expect to find it paired with an AC'97 codec chip, while instead the CS4610 is paired with the ISA CS4239. This was done, because at the time this allowed DOS games to output sound using SoundBlaster Pro emulation.
To get sound under Linux you will have to use the OSS cs4232 or ALSA snd-cs4236 driver for the ISA soundchip instead.
A good thread on the problem can be found in the alsa-devel mailing list
Affected Models
Solutions
Activating the devices
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TODO
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This should no longer be necessary with any recent distribution, if anyone can validate, and if so remove this section
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First you must make sure that the sound devices are activated.
Disable "Quick Boot" in your ThinkPad BIOS, otherwise the sound devices will not be activated by the BIOS. To enter the BIOS, press F1 before switching the ThinkPad on and until the first beep is heard.
You can also manually activate the sound card once booted:
- With apm and pnpbios, this is done with setpnp from the pcmcia package:
# setpnp 0x0e on# setpnp 0x0f on
- With acpi and pnpacpi, use these commands:
# echo 'activate' > /sys/devices/pnp0/00:05/resources# echo 'activate' > /sys/devices/pnp0/00:06/resources
It seems that with very new kernels and ACPI enabled, you will need to manually enable the device even if you have correctly disabled "Quick Boot".
This only works with newer kernels that fully support pnpacpi, and provided that this patch has been applied (applied to Linus' tree in july 2005).
It seems that the default dma numbers change when pnpacpi is used (to dma1=1 dma2=3, for instance).
If you're using acpi and pnpacpi, you can see which resources the sound card is using like this:
# cat /sys/devices/pnp0/00:05/resources# cat /sys/devices/pnp0/00:06/resources
Using ALSA
Compile the sound driver as a module and load it after everything else. You can add the following line to a boot script, ie. rc.local for that:
/sbin/modprobe snd-cs4236 index=0 port=0x530 cport=0x538 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=0 isapnp=0
This is reported to work at least with kernel 2.6.15.
On the 770x using kernel 2.6.16/2.6.17 you may try this:
/sbin/modprobe snd-cs4232 port=0x530 cport=0x120 irq=5 dma1=1 dma2=0 isapnp=0
There is a nice script which can do all this for you, including activation of the device and detecting the correct resource settings to use.
