As I mentioned on a thread about flash-plugin a few days ago, I'm having trouble with my sound device getting "stuck" and thereby causing problems for anything that accesses it, like video playback.
Rebooting the machine "fixes" it for a while, but it's unpredictable for how long -- sometimes months go by without it recurring, sometimes it happens every couple of days. Right now I'm in one of the latter phases.
Any suggestions on how I could reset the controller without having to reboot? (Or suggestions for where else I might ask this question?) Below is output from "lshw" for the audio controller, and "lsmod" for the sound modules that are loaded. This is CentOS 4.7.
*-multimedia UNCLAIMED description: Multimedia audio controller product: CK804 AC'97 Audio Controller vendor: nVidia Corporation physical id: d bus info: pci@0000:00:0d.0 version: a2 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: pm bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 maxlatency=5 mingnt=2 resources: ioport:d400(size=256) ioport:d000(size=256) memory:ff6fd000-ff6fdfff
snd_intel8x0 36237 3 snd_ac97_codec 65425 1 snd_intel8x0 snd_pcm_oss 52857 0 snd_mixer_oss 22081 2 snd_pcm_oss snd_pcm 92613 3 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm_oss snd_timer 28357 1 snd_pcm snd_page_alloc 14541 2 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm gameport 8641 1 snd_intel8x0 snd_mpu401_uart 11457 1 snd_intel8x0 snd_rawmidi 28133 1 snd_mpu401_uart snd_seq_device 12105 1 snd_rawmidi snd 58149 12 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer,snd_mpu401_uart,snd_rawmidi,snd_seq_device soundcore 13345 2 snd