[ltp] Re: HDA-Intel and Beeps

[Robert Tomsick]

On Wed, 2009-11-25 at 20:52 +0100, Elias Oltmanns wrote:
> kionez <kionez@anche.no> wrote:
> > Hi all, there is the results of our reports:
> >
> > http://kionez.org/thinkpad_beep/index.php
> [...]
> > Is there anyone subscribed to alsa-devel mailing lists?
> >
> > I'm not so able to write in english, but if no-one can submit a
> > mail\request\bug to ALSA-developers I'll do it when I have some time (in
> > the weekend, i hope..), we have to write a clear and understendable mail.
> 
> Have the alsa developers been notified or have they even responded yet?
> If not, I've got something that might be of interest to you as well as
> them. Finally, I started configuring my new X200s today. Remembering the
> discussion about beeps on this list, I checked and did, indeed, observe
> the same problem, i.e. no beeps generated through pcspkr or snd_pcsp,
> respectively.
> 
> The simple workaround, it turned out, was to make sure that the
> power_save parameter of the snd_hda_intel module was set to 0. On my
> system I had to comment out the following line in
> /etc/modprobe.d/asla-base.conf:
> 
> options snd-hda-intel power_save=10 power_save_controller=N

That is indeed interesting.  It is worth noting that the above
workaround has a non-zero cost w/ regards to battery life.  Informal
testing (i.e. me mucking about with powertop) reveals an approx. 0.25W
increase if you leave the sound hardware on all the time.  For me that's
not really worth it, but YMMV.

Good to see that we've narrowed down the bug though.  Nice detective
work!

-Rob