Rc8 C860 No Sound

[StM]

I have a related (I believe) problem. XMMS will often refuse to play the next (MP3) file in a sequence, for no apparent reason. Any further attempt to do anything sound related (restart esd, run mpg123, etc.) results in an error message "/dev/dsp: Device a resource busy" or "Can't open /dev/dsp!". This does not go away when I kill X. I couldn't immediately identify who is holding /dev/dsp (esd is not running, and an attempt to start it results in this same error message), and fstat is not available...

Two separate questions: (1) Why can this be happening in the first place? (2) Once it has happened, what can I do, short of rebooting?

FWIW, this is in RC8 only; I can't recall seeing it in RC5.

[StM]

An update... I grabbed a copy of lsof, and recalled that fuser also serves the purpose. Both show nothing (i.e., /dev/dsp -> /dev/sound/dsp is free, according to them). Yet, any attempt to start esd | esdcat | esdctl yields "Can't open /dev/dsp!". I am running as root.

Any ideas?..

[thseiler]

To Laze:
Were any sound related patches applied to the kernel tree between RC5 and RC8 ?

the symtoms could be caused by a glitch in the audio driver's close routine
i.e a forgotten semaphore...

thseiler

[Laze]

Most of the problems are related to xmms - just try other output plugins.. We have choosen to use the new default because it worked better together with the volume applet.