ZFS on USB / Sound on alienware m11x

Gautham Ganapathy gautham at lisphacker.org
Mon Apr 18 17:23:13 UTC 2011


Hi

I am trying out FreeBSD on ZFS using the PC-BSD 8.2 installer. I have
it installed on a Western Digital USB HDD connected to an Alienware
m11x laptop. It seems to work well except that once in a while, any
application performing a write freezes for a few seconds (around 15 or
so) and looking at top shows their states to be in zio. Is this
because it was installed on a USB drive?

I am trying to get sound working on the laptop. After starting snd_hda
at boot, two devices are found and dmesg shows the following

hdac0: <NVidia (Unknown) High Definition Audio Controller> mem
0xf1000000-0xf1003fff irq 17 at device 0.1 on pci1
hdac0: HDA Driver Revision: 20100226_0142
hdac0: [ITHREAD]

hdac1: <Intel 82801I High Definition Audio Controller> mem
0xf1600000-0xf1603fff irq 22 at device 27.0 on pci0
hdac1: HDA Driver Revision: 20100226_0142
hdac1: [ITHREAD]

hdac0: HDA Codec #0: NVidia (Unknown)
hdac0: HDA Codec #1: NVidia (Unknown)
hdac0: HDA Codec #2: NVidia (Unknown)
hdac0: HDA Codec #3: NVidia (Unknown)

pcm0: <HDA NVidia (Unknown) PCM #0 DisplayPort> at cad 0 nid 1 on hdac0
pcm1: <HDA NVidia (Unknown) PCM #0 DisplayPort> at cad 1 nid 1 on hdac0
pcm2: <HDA NVidia (Unknown) PCM #0 DisplayPort> at cad 2 nid 1 on hdac0
pcm3: <HDA NVidia (Unknown) PCM #0 DisplayPort> at cad 3 nid 1 on hdac0

hdac1: HDA Codec #0: Realtek ALC665
pcm4: <HDA Realtek ALC665 PCM #0 Analog> at cad 0 nid 1 on hdac1
pcm5: <HDA Realtek ALC665 PCM #1 Analog> at cad 0 nid 1 on hdac1

I think the NVIDIA device is for the HDMI output, while the Realtek
codec is for the normal audio.

Under /dev, I can see six devices dsp0.0,dsp1.1,dsp2.1,dsp3.1,dsp4.0
and dsp5.1. I tried playing an mp3 file using mpg123 and gave each of
these devices using the -a option, but none of them worked. The output
tab under the GNOME sound preferences shows the devices dsp0, dsp1,
dsp2, dsp3, dsp4 and dsp5. None of them seem to work either.

Any ideas on how to get the wound working?

Gautham


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