[OpenIndiana-discuss] No audio on Ryzen system

[Gary Mills]

On Fri, Jul 06, 2018 at 06:17:14PM +0200, Aurélien Larcher wrote:
> Probably fix the Pulseaudio OSS backend or merge Alexander's PR to
> default libmatemixer to OSS.

The problem seems to be that this system has two audio devices.
Here's how they appear in the device driver utility:

    Audio   Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Caicos HDMI Audio [Radeon
            HD 6450 / 7450/8450/8490 OEM / R5 230/235/235X OEM]     audiohd
    
    Audio   Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] Family 17h (Models 00h-0fh)
            HD Audio Controller                                     audiohd

The HDMI device, instance zero, is on the video card.  The other,
instance one, is on the motherboard.  They show up this way in /dev:

lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           7 Sep 20  2017 /dev/audio -> sound/0
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           9 Sep 20  2017 /dev/sound/0 -> audiohd:0
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           9 Sep 20  2017 /dev/sound/1 -> audiohd:1

I've been investigating this problem since last week.  The solution
seems to be putting AUDIODEV=/dev/sound/1 into the desktop
environment.  I put that into my .profile and exported it from there,
and then logged out and in again.

I verified that the new environment variable showed up in
mate-terminal, and also with `pargs -e' that it appeared in the
environment list of mate-volume-control-applet and the pulseaudio
daemon.

This command now gives me sound:

    $ audioplay /usr/share/audio/samples/au/gong.au

This one displays the correct device:

    $ audioctl show-device
    Device: /dev/sound/audiohd:1mixer
      Name    = audiohd#1
      Config  = onboard1 (a)
      HW Info = Unknown HD codec: 0x10ec0887

However, there's still no audio from desktop applications.  I suspect
that pulseaudio and mate-volume-control-applet are both ignoring the
AUDIODEV environment variable.  I read about a patch for pulseaudio
that fixed this problem.  I don't know if the volume control applet
has an equivalent patch.

PS: I see three mixer devices in /dev .  Two appear to be hardware
devices.  The third appears to be software.


-- 
-Gary Mills-		-refurb-		-Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-