[Solved] Conflict: ATI Radeon HDMI vs onboard sound crashes PulseAudio

Question

Firstly, please excuse my ignorance about audio issues!
I have a mate running Arch who has an ATI Radeon HD5450 graphics card (using radeon driver) and onboard sound also. He doesn't want to use the graphics card for audio purposes at all. He's getting (seemingly) random switches between PulseAudio thinking its default audio sink is the onboard sound and the graphics card. When the latter happens, PulseAudio crashes out.
(Tried setting the kernel boot parameter 'radeon.audio=1' to try and make the HDMI audio work, but to no avail. Though card is in radeon driver matrix saying HDMI audio feature should work with this card.)
Issuing these commands usually gets things up and running again:
pulseaudio --start && pacmd set-default-sink alsa_output.xxxxx.analog-stereo
where alsa_output.xxxxx.analog-stereo is the appropriate string from the 'Default Sink' line of the ouput from the command:
pactl stat
Tried switching the HDMI input/output off using pavucontrol but after an indeterminate time it creeps back and kills off PulseAudio.
Can the graphics card be blacklisted as a soundcard by PulseAudio or Alsa in some way?
Any ideas to resolve this most welcome!
PS: Had a look through the Arch Wiki on PulseAudio and it helped quite a bit with understanding pactl and pacmd commands.
Edit @29/01/14: Problem solved - by going deeper to kernel level!
From the wiki:
If both devices use the same module then we can use the *enable* parameter from snd-hda-intel module, it's an array of booleans that can enable/disable the desired sound card [put in /etc/modprobe.d/modprobe.conf]:
e.g
options snd-hda-intel enable=1,0
Useful commands to check situation:
cat /proc/asound/cards
cat /proc/asound/modules
aplay -l
Last edited by ninian (2014-01-29 23:14:35)

Answer 1

Silex89 wrote:
Hi there!
If you're using the latest kernel spin (3.13), you don't have to really put that kernel parameter in your bootloader config anymore because it's enabled by default already. Which DE are you using? GNOME, GNOME Flashback, Cinnamon and Unity have all integrated with pulseaudio and no extra configuration is needed. If you're using Xfce, LXDE, KDE or any other WM/DE, you'll have to install pulseaudio-alsa and alsa-utils to get it working. That made my HDMI audio work out of the box on my ancient KDE session with the open source driver.
I hope this helps!
Best of Luck
Hi,
okay I just removed the kernel option, thanks for the advice!
I'm using xfce and I already had installed pulseaudio-alsa and alsa-utils, anyway the strange thing is that before switching to headphones (on the other card) it worked, but now it seems that is dead...
Thank you for helping!