Sound issues on dual-boot machine

[Damon Butler]

Mike Woods wrote:
> Damon Butler wrote:
> 
>> Sound functions under FreeBSD only if I boot into Linux first and then 
>> reboot the machine into FreeBSD. This sounds rather incredible (to me 
>> at least) but here's what I've done to confirm this.
> 
> Initialisation :)
> 
> Your soundcard needs initialising before it'll function in some way that 
> linux understands and FreeBSD does not, once linux has done the dirty 
> the card is then alive and kicking.

Hurm. That's all well and good, I guess, but *why* is Linux initializing 
the on-board sound while FreeBSD is/can not? I admit my understanding of 
PC hardware to be limited, but I had thought that the purpose of the 
BIOS was to "initialize" the hardware for the OS to recognize. Doesn't 
it hand out IRQs and so forth?

Is my problem indicative of a general driver deficiency in FreeBSD?
Is there some module I'm not aware of that, were I to load it, take care 
of this mysterious "initialization"?

--Damon