[PlanetCCRMA] How can I incorporate Dell M90 Intel HDA patch for LFE speaker into ccrma-rt ?

[Ron Fox]

Hi All,

I'm running the latest ccrmart kernal installed on top of F8 on my Dell
M90 Precision laptop.  I've gotten jack working nicely now after setting
qjackctl to run jackd with NumberOfPeriods=3 and Playback only.

Everything I've tried has worked well but the quality of sound from my
laptop speakers is sorely lacking.  The M90 has 2 2W front speakers
(which are working) and a 5W LFE speaker with a "Bass Reflex Port" which
does not work under Linux.  I know that the LFE speaker is installed and
capable of outputting good sound because I can play an audio CD with
WinXP Media Player's Equalizer set to 0 response at middle and high
frequencies.  The low frequency sounds on the CD track come through very
nicely from behind the LFE speaker grill (on the bottom of the laptop).

A similar test with the same audio CD on the same laptop running Amarok
under CCRMA-RT has no audible output from the LFE speaker.

There is a patch to alsa-driver that enables support for the LFE speaker
on the M90:
http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa-kernel/diff/957cd88b2d52/pci/hda/patch_sigmatel.c

Another patch is designed to look for a mono speaker output pin with a
separate amplifier and to enable a LFE switch and control for it on the
Dell M90 and some other Dell laptops:
http://hg.alsa-project.org/alsa-kernel/diff/f4bc9cc7e577/pci/hda/patch_sigmatel.c

I don't think those patches are present in the CCRMA-RT distribution, at
least the LFE device doesn't show up in the output from the alsainfo
script.

My question is, how do I include those patches or enable them for use
under the CCRMA-RT kernel.

I don't have a alsa-driver package installed so I'm assuming that the
code lives elsewhere.

$ cat ~/.jackdrc
/usr/bin/jackd -dalsa -dhw:0 -r48000 -p1024 -n3 -P

$ uname -a Linux kolea.hosag.com 2.6.24.7-1.rt3.2.fc8.ccrmart #1 SMP
PREEMPT RT Mon May 12 17:53:55 EDT 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

$ rpm -qa |grep -i alsa
alsa-tools-firmware-1.0.16-1.fc8
alsa-firmware-1.0.16-1.fc8.1
alsa-oss-1.0.14-3.fc8
alsa-lib-devel-1.0.16-3.fc8
alsa-plugins-upmix-1.0.15-3.fc8.1
bluez-utils-alsa-3.20-7.fc8
alsa-plugins-samplerate-1.0.15-3.fc8.1
alsa-oss-libs-1.0.14-3.fc8
alsa-lib-1.0.16-3.fc8
clalsadrv-1.2.2-1.fc8.ccrma
alsa-plugins-jack-1.0.15-3.fc8.1
alsa-oss-devel-1.0.14-3.fc8
alsa-plugins-oss-1.0.15-3.fc8.1
alsa-plugins-vdownmix-1.0.15-3.fc8.1
alsa-tools-1.0.16-1.fc8
alsamixergui-0.9.0-0.3.rc1.fc8.2
alsa-utils-1.0.16-3.fc8

Thanks to all who make this fantastic software available, it's sparked a
whole new interest for me!

Regards,
Ron