snd_hda peculiarities

[Richard L. Mace]

I recently installed FreeBSD 8.0 (amd64) on my laptop (HP 8510w) and most 
things are working. However, a minor annoyance is that I only get sound if I 
manually load snd_hda via:

# kldload snd_hda

i.e., after booting. If I place the following in /boot/loader.conf

snd_hda_load="YES"

I get no sound, even though the driver seems to load and cat /dev/sndstat 
gives
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
FreeBSD Audio Driver (newpcm: 64bit 2009061500/amd64)
Installed devices:
pcm0: <HDA Analog Devices AD1981HD PCM #0 Analog> at cad 0 nid 1 on hdac0 kld 
snd_hda [MPSAFE] (1p:1v/1r:1v channels duplex default)
pcm1: <HDA Analog Devices AD1981HD PCM #1 Digital> at cad 0 nid 1 on hdac0 kld 
snd_hda [MPSAFE] (1p:1v/0r:0v channels simplex)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Googling, I found this page: 

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-bugs/2009-June/035677.html

Which reports precisely the behaviour I am experiencing. No fix or workaround 
is suggested.

Has anyone with similar hardware managed to get this driver working? Any 
workarounds to my problem? My audio hardware is...

$pciconf -lv 
<stuff omitted>
hdac0 at pci0:0:27:0:      class=0x040300 card=0x30c5103c chip=0x284b8086 
rev=0x03 hdr=0x00        
    vendor     = 'Intel Corporation'                                                            
    device     = 'Intel audio controller embedded with the 82801H chipset ( 
ICH8 chipset ) (82801H)'                                                                                            
    class      = multimedia                                                                     
    subclass   = HDA 

And I am using
$ uname -a
FreeBSD belenos 8.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE #0: Sat Nov 21 15:02:08 UTC 
2009     root at mason.cse.buffalo.edu:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC  amd64

Many thanks
-Richard