Sound issues on dual-boot machine

[Mike Woods]

Damon Butler wrote:

> 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?

The bios is more like a wakeup call, it tells things that need to be 
told to wake up and say hello, anything after that is up to the 
hardware, more than likley it's a quirk in the particular peice of 
hardware, something about the way it works that differes just enough 
from the norm to need special attention to get it going.

> 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" ?

No, this looks like a device specific quirk, like how the 3com 905c will 
always try and share irq's with my soundcard in my home machine 
regardless of anything i do yet in other machines it behaves itself :)

With the sheer amount of hardware and variations on hardware available 
these things are to be occasionaly expected :)

-----------------
Mike Woods
IT Technician