snd_hda autodetection

[Brian M. Waters]

Cross-post from freebsd-hardware@:

I have been messing around trying to get the snd_hda driver to work
100% on my ThinkPad. There are a lot of HDA chips out there, and it
turns out laptop manufacturers are real "cowboy" about wiring them up
- pins x, y, z on one machine may not have the same function as pins
x, y, z on another machine. To make matters worse, these quirks are
never documented. However, Linux (and Windows) "just work" on these
platforms - while FreeBSD (at least on my X230) requires manually
experimenting with the snd_hda driver's configuration via
device.hints. I am not sure exactly how Linux/Windows handle this -
perhaps they do some kind of probing, or perhaps they ship with a long
list of known quirks. My question is: is there some technical reason
this has not been implemented in FreeBSD, or is it simply something
waiting to be implemented? Is there any way I can help out?

BW