Onboard soundcard just disappearing...

[Tom <tom@abwaerts.be>]

Hey all,

I was listening to some radio broadcast with MPlayer. I quit MPlayer to 
start listening some music with XMMS, but without any apparent reason, 
XMMS couldn't output any sound at all any more. It didn't show the 
usual error dialog, though ("please check that..."), but since I 
started it from the command line, I noticed an endless chain of alsa 
errors ("broken pipes, alsa_free(), failed" is the gist of it as far as 
I recall).

In the meantime, I've recompiled my kernel some times and generally 
tried about anything I could think of (not that much, I'm afraid, since 
I've never had this kind of audio problem before).

"alsaconf" no longer detects any PCI or PnP cards, alsamixer of course 
can't mix anything at all. I was about to wonder whether my onboard 
sound thingy just exploded or something, but judging from the output of 
both dmesg (1) and lspci (2), it seems to be there and to be noticed 
just fine.

(1) intel8x0_measure_ac97_clock: measured 49260 usecs
    intel8x0: clocking to 48000
    ALSA device list:
    #0: Virtual MIDI Card 1
    #1: Intel 82801BA-ICH2 at 0xa800, irq 17
(2) 0000:00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corp. 82801BA/BAM
      AC'97 Audio (rev 04)
    Subsystem: Asustek Computer, Inc.: Unknown device 8095
    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 0, IRQ 17
    I/O ports at a800 [size=256]
    I/O ports at a400 [size=64]

At this point, I'm getting out of ideas. Kernel version is 2.6.7. I'd 
say I've done something wrong compiling it with alsa support, but that 
can't be it, since it has been functioning for quite some time now, and 
just suddenly refused to continue to do so.

Could anybody please help me find out what's wrong here...?

Greets,
Tom