Soundblaster X-Fi fails to be detected by ALSA

Question

Seemingly there's a 50/50 chance that my X-Fi chipset card fails to be detected by ALSA after bootup, sometimes the card works, sometimes it does not.
It is listed in lspci -v (this is when the card is not working)
06:00.0 Audio device: Creative Labs EMU20k2 [X-Fi Titanium Series] (rev 04)
Subsystem: Creative Labs Device 0043
Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 10
Memory at f0200000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Memory at f0000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2M]
Memory at ec000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64M]
Capabilities: <access denied>
Kernel modules: snd_ctxfi
Any ideas what I can do to troubleshoot or maybe even hotfix this? So far, the only possible solution for this I've got is a cold boot (i.e. turning off the computer, waiting for a bit and then turning it back on; a basic restart usually won't fix this; but a cold boot doesn't have a 100% chance of solving it either) I have never run into a similar problem under Windows, so I doubt it's a hardware issue (maybe between the firmware and the snd_ctxfi driver?).
According to this, it might be a bit more complicated than a regression (i.e. on one version of ubuntu the guy could run his X-Fi card, but not on a newer version, and yet when he downgraded alsa drivers in the newer version or used the older version's kernel, that never fixed his problem, but reinstalling the older version did fix it)
Update:
When the card fails to load, I get this on boot:
maí 08 20:33:10 Cestaria kernel: snd_ctxfi 0000:06:00.0: cannot find the slot for index 0 (range 0-1), error: -16
maí 08 20:33:10 Cestaria kernel: snd_ctxfi: probe of 0000:06:00.0 failed with error -16
Last edited by rabcor (2015-05-08 20:38:42)

Answer 1

Nothing of the sort, here's what I've got (across a blacklists file and an alsa.conf file)
blacklist nouveau
blacklist snd_hda_intel
options snd-ctxfi index=0
options snd-hda-intel index=1
(I'm blacklisting snd_hda_intel because of my intergrated sound card, I set it to index 1  because it is used for my nvidia hdmi sound, then again the blacklist doesn't seem to be working very well; not quite sure if I really need to blacklist nouveau, I do it out of old habit I guess)
Also, as I write this I just had a cold boot which worked to make alsa read my card, so this is the status until I restart my computer next where it's seemingly random whether my x-fi will be found or not:
$ cat /proc/asound/cards
0 [XFi ]: SB-XFi - Creative X-Fi
Creative X-Fi 20K2 SB0880
1 [PCH ]: HDA-Intel - HDA Intel PCH
HDA Intel PCH at 0xf4110000 irq 30
2 [NVidia ]: HDA-Intel - HDA NVidia
HDA NVidia at 0xf4080000 irq 17
I can try that id thing if you think it could help. Not sure how worth mentioning it is, but changes with lspci -v from the OP with the card working is that the IRQ is now 18 instead of 10 (somehow I suspect that doesn't matter at all, but I don't know what it is), and it states: kernel driver in use: snd_ctxfi properly now.
So I take it it's not just ALSA, but the card is failing to initialize on boot now despite the device being properly detected by the kernel. Am I correct?
Last edited by rabcor (2015-04-27 23:31:38)