Onboard soundcard & FreeBSD 5.0 ???

[Orion Hodson]

/-- "Vlado Korcek" wrote:
| 
|       Hi People,
|     I've tried to set up the sound card on my machine but unsuccessfully
|    :-(
|     I'm running FreeBSD 5.0. The MB is Abit NF7-S based on nForce2
|     chipset. The sound card is on board:  AC 97 CODEC on board
|     I've compiled the KERNEL with "device pcm" in order to get the
|     audio running. But when I reboot the system and then I check for the
|     device, I see nothing:
|        grep pcm /var/run/dmesg.boot  - shows no pcm device
|        dmesg | grep pcm - no device listed
|    If I look to /boot/kernel/ , I see the snd_* module are loaded.
|    But when I look into /dev/  there is nothing like:
|    /dev/audio
|    /dev/dsp
|    /dev/mixer
|    ...
| 
|    I wonder why?

Support for your h/w is more recent that 5.0 had built in.  Your pcm device is 
implements ich audio controller interface.  Looking at the CVS log for the ich 
audio driver at:

	http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/sound/pci/ich.c

you can see support for the nForce2 was added on January 13th.  It went into 
the stable branch (4.x) a week later.

|    Could anyone advice me what can be the problem and how to get it
|     running???

Support for the nForce2 just requires an additional device id in the probing 
routine.  You could look at the diff in CVS and apply that to your tree.

Alternatively, you could move to a version of FreeBSD that supports it.  5.0 
is not a very good place to be these days - there are few developers 
interested in tracking problems there.  If you want a solid bsd then install 
4.8R.  If you are prepared to endure an early adopter version the go with 5.1R.

Cheers
- Orion