• Hector Martin's avatar
    ALSA: hda - Acer Aspire 8930G support · 3b315d70
    Hector Martin authored
    Short story: this laptop has 5.1 built-in speakers which you *really*
    want to use (the not-so-"sub" woofer is what makes the audio above
    average for a laptop), so 6-channel support is important (plus a decent
    asound.conf to upmix stereo). It also has the 3 typical jacks that ought
    to have a selectable mode. And it's based on ALC889, which sucks.
    
    Rationale/explanations:
    
    The const_channel_count stuff was added because, for a laptop like this,
    you always have 6 channels available (internal speakers) but still need
    to set the mode for the 3 external jacks. Therefore, the device always
    needs to be in 6-channel mode but there still needs to be a mixer
    control for the jack mode. You could use line/mic-in at the same time as
    the 6 internal speakers, for example. You might be tempted to make it
    even smarter by dynamically switching the max channel count when
    headphones are plugged in (therefore muting the internal speakers and
    reducing the physical channel count to the jack channel mode), but as a
    user I consider this to be harmful because I want the audio to blow up
    to 6 channels / upmixed as soon as I unplug the headphones, and having
    opened the device while in 2-channel mode would prevent this from
    working (and always making 6-channel mode available doesn't do any harm).
    
    The hardware needs EAPD turned on and the DACs routed to the internal
    speaker pins, so the patch adds those verbs.
    
    The ALC889 CLFE and subsequent (side/aux, here unused) DACs do NOT work
    by default, at least here. I wasted much time trying to talk to
    Realtek/pshou about this, but they just kept sending me useless updates
    to patch_realtek.c that did nothing relevant. In the end I gave up and
    brute forced the issue by trying to flip every bit in the proprietary
    coefficient registers, and eventually found the two magic registers that
    need to be cleared to enable all DACs. I have only heard Acer users
    complain, but that might be because ALC889 is pretty new and using 5.1
    (and noticing the missing center/lfe channels) might not be that common.
    If this is a generalized issue with all ALC889 systems then those verbs
    should probably be moved to a common verb array.
    
    The internal mic is untested and probably doesn't work.
    
    These settings will probably work for other Acer Gemstone laptops with
    the same 5.1 speaker config. When identified, those should be added to
    the PCI subsystem ID list.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarHector Martin <hector@marcansoft.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarTakashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
    3b315d70
patch_realtek.c 564 KB