Sound device reported but no devices created

[Ian Smith]

On Sun, 30 Jul 2006, Peter Jeremy wrote:

 > On Sun, 2006-Jul-30 12:10:54 +0800, Ariff Abdullah wrote:
 > >On Sun, 30 Jul 2006 13:43:52 +1000
 > >Peter Jeremy <peterjeremy at optushome.com.au> wrote:
 > >> I've been trying to get sound working on a Compaq Armada 1580 with
 > >> a recent 6-STABLE.  With devices 'sound' and 'snd_sbc' built into
 > >> the kernel and no hints, I get:
 > ...
 > >> I suspect the problem is that sbc0 is not triggering attachment of
 > >> pcm0 but I'm uncertain why.  Does anyone have any suggestions?
 > >> 
 > >Try to disable ACPI, or edit /usr/src/sys/dev/sound/isa/sbc.c and
 > >remove acpi module dependency (line 794)
 > 
 > The system is too old to support ACPI.  I've removed the module
 > dependency anyway with no difference.

Peter, I don't know if this is likely helpful or not, but my Compaq is a
1500c with an ESS ES1869, reporting (on 5.4-RELEASE):

sbc0: <ESS ES1869 (Compaq OEM)> at port 0x330-0x331,0x388-0x38b,0x220-0x22f irq 5 drq 5,1 on isa0
pcm0: <ESS 18xx DSP> on sbc0

I too have in kernel:

 device          sound
 device          snd_sbc                 # ES1869 (Compaq OEM)

but after much headscratching it only finally worked after adding:

 snd_ess_load="YES"      # this fixed it .. bridge driver for ESS

to /boot/loader.conf.  My soon to be built 5-STABLE kernel will include
also 'device snd_ess' directly, and I'm expecting that to work too. 

HTH, Ian