So everything was working flawlessly, and I had to switch over into Mandrake to get something, and when I rebooted to Gentoo again, chaos reigned.

Well, not quite chaos, but several modules were refusing to load, with lots of scary messages about IRQ settings and other hogwash.

Actually, somehow, with building kernel modules for vmware and alsasound, it seems that module loading got completely hosed – it was trying to load e100, for example, which was a directory name.

So I edited my kernel config and removed dozens of modules for net, and usb and stuff that I didn't want anyway (i.e. ditched uhci.o in favor of usb_uhci.o, ditched the e100.o driver in favor of eepro100.o). Recreating all of the modules MINUS the alsa drivers helped.

I also installed the pcmcia-cs package with USE=”nocardbus” since PCMCIA and CardBus support are in the kernel.

After verifying that cleaned up the problem, I re-emerged the alsa-driver…
had to rmmod the sound drivers that had loaded themselves (so just soundcore remained), and restarted alsa, and that seemed happy.

Rebooted, and everythign is kaflooey again. Sheeiit.
Dammit, I'm an idjit. I mean really..

rc-update del alsasound
rc-update add alsasound boot

That fixed it, I'd added alsasound as a default starter, which means the modules were being loaded by the autoload process.

And THEN, it's still borked…so I removed the extra sound module, i810_sound.o from the /lib/modules…. /kernel/sound path (where modules are installed, rebooted, and voila! no nastygrams. So, it looks like alsa and the audio drivers were fighting, and bringing a whole bunch o' extra junk into the match.

YEESH

References:

gentoo bug 24391