Greetz all.

Please allow me to introduce myself. I'm a 20+ year Slackware guy who always builds custom kernels (for Slack), multiboots and tries out other distros just to try to keep up, but Slack is my Main. Some distros only last a week, but years ago I tried OpenSuse and quite liked it, ran it for several months off and on but regularly. I knew it was pretty serious when it actually allowed runlevel 3 default boot with a real root account, so recently I thought I'd move up to Leap 15.3. It's pretty sweet.

However one wrinkle is driving me crazy. This is on a secondary machine an Asrock Z77 Extreme 4 with an i5 3550 and an old MSI GTX-640 PCIe GPU. It works great in Slackware 15.0-RC3. Graphics worked fine on Suse OOB but HDMI audio wasn't even detected. Since I'd seen such events on some other distros that were fixed by installing the NVIDIA_foo.run installer, I web searched and found "The Hard Way" and was happily surprised it worked without a hitch... well excepting HDMI Audio.

First thing I tried was YAST Sound. It didn't show Nvidia HDMI so at first I tried just modprobing all the modules that worked with kernel 5.15.12 on Slack... still no go, whether issuing alsa commands or pavucontrol or re-consulting YAST. So I enabled onboard audio knowing it too employs sda-hda-intel. After a bit of fiddling Onboard worked, but I don't want it. I want HDMI. Onboard was just to get a "leg up". Once I had Onboard working I ran mkinitrd since Suse apparently pits damn near everything in initrd, figuring that was a good starting point and reference.

Nothing I do gets Suse to even detect Nvidia HDMI Audio. I've web searched repeatedly, signed up for Suse Forums and searched there, and mkinitrd'd and rebooted many dozens of times to zero avail.

What am I doing wrong? I can't discover any errors with dmesg, pavucontrol, aplay, ... whatever. Any suggestions gladly accepted.

Thanks in advance

Let me clarify please:
You boot Slackware and OpenSUSE on that same machine and sound works as desired on Slackware, yet on OpenSUSE, with the same hardware, cabling, driver (Nvidia), sound architecture (pulseaudio) and settings (i.e. actually choosing the correct sound output), it doesn't?

Hi there,

Just wanted to say I get the exact same behavior on my machine. I use openSuSE Leap 15.3 with a GeForce GT 1030. Even though it works wonderful on RHEL 8.5, MX Linux, Ubuntu, Mint and the such, I fail at finding out why HDMI Audio is not available (and not even detected, just like the thread initiator described). Yes, I did use the exact same cable, monitor and PC (a Lenovo Thinkcentre M720s, an older LG display and the aforementioned graphics adapter). I did install nVidia drivers using "the easy way", just to try that out (I'm a Debian & FreeBSD guy at heart) and found the process itself to be neat, and I also like how the distro is put together, but this HDMI thing kinda kills it for me (as trivial as it may sound).

I would also be curious if anyone found a solution to this.

Cheers!

Hello ondoho and thank you for responding. The answer is a qualified "yes". I am specifying qualified because the kernels are different which implies the modules are possibly different even though they have the same name. However the GPU is quite old, a GT 640 Nvidia card. So far I haven't been able to identify the exact name specifying the manufacturer of the type of audio chip contained in that graphics card. That may be key since Yast Sound has a section where one can specify chipsets like GK104 and a whole list of sound chip manufacturers and their many models.

One other reason for tenuous "qualified" is that when modprobing the exact modules that Slackware uses to try to duplicate the conditions that work perfectly in Slackware, Leap 15.3 automatically adds in a few. I'll get a list of those and post an update.

BTW I was curious if HDMI was a problem common in OpenSuse since I have seen several posts of such so I installed 15.3 on a newer system which has a GTX 760 graphics card and it worked OOB. The older GT 640 is a remarkable performer especially considering it cost under 40 bux USD several years ago (it slightly outperforms a $200+ slightly older 8800GT) but MSI no longer makes this specific model and are unclear as to which specific audio chip it has. One similar unit has a VIA chip while others have Realtek and some, who knows? I've tried VIA specific and Realtek specific modules even though Slackware had no such requirements but they didn't work either.

I'll get back with that list soon

Holy Serendipity Batman! This is crazy! I'll list the comparison snd modules shortly but WOW! check this out!

OK so I have 3 drives on this old box in question and it's so old it doesn't support NVME nor EFI boot. So in order to boot each system I have to selct which drive to boot from in BIOS. In my haste to try to use Grub2 from Suse to boot them all (I'm an utter n00b at Grub) after reading in Yast -BootLoader that OSProber would only recognize systems that were in the same /boot directory/partition as Grub, I just placed vmlinuz-slack and System-map-Slack in Suse's /boot.

Lo and behold the default Suse menuitem unbeknownst to me at first was set to boot Suse system with Slackware's 5.4.164 kernel !!! Naturally although it did reach runlevel 3 Login, no modules loaded since I never use initrd on Slack. So just for experiment I copied Slack's /lib/modules/5.4.164 and /user/src/5.4.164 to Suse.

Not only did it boot as before but it went right to KDE desktop AND HDMI SOUND WORKS! ... with a Slackware vanilla custom kernel built from raw source

Before anything else I think I will try building 5.4.164 in Suse and keep Suse's 5.3.18-59.37-default as a backup, using "make olddefconfig" for 5.4.164 and nameit a specific term to keep all 3 kernels to compare. I'm a bit shocked as well as excited it booted.

UPDATE: It looks like I will just have to wait to build that kernel in Suse since it is still on glibc 2.31. I may try to download a new source file direct from kernel.org and see if it will build but for now it works and I have the option to boot from either kernel. Meanwhile I'm thinking of transferring Suse to the SSD drive on that system to see if it is worth buying another SATA SSD. It flat out blazes on a newer box that at least supports NVME when on a PCIe sled. The only other option would be to use SATA for Boot and NVME on a sled for the rest of the system.

So it is definitely a kernel/driver issue?

Actually ondoho, I'm not certain. First it worked and then it didn't. I built a kernel and tried that but it never worked. I mean it booted and with the tweaks it ran really great but no audio. I messed around and broke Grub2, messed around all night to try to fix it, and got to thinking that I had learned a few things by messing around so it was probably wise to reinstall and stop trying to "Slackify Suse" and depend on Yast more. The install went very well, I knew exactly what I was going to want in software in the way of devtools and apps and how to use Yast for all the deep setup, and not only do I now have a slick system but sound works with zero hiccups. Thanks for witnessing my extreme noobishness and not laughing out loud

Here's my desktop tonight


Full size here - https://i.imgur.com/ux2tunb.jpg

Attached Thumbnails

 

So, I'm not sure if this is solved now, or if you're even looking for a solution, but if the answers are no, and yes, then you'll have to stop with the philosophical narrative and give us something (technical) to work with (see first link in my signature).

I don't understand. Wasn't "and not only do I now have a slick system but sound works with zero hiccups" clear? and what did you think was "philosophical narrative"? I test lots of systems and have for decades. It took a few years to learn to not try to make them work exactly like my favorites but sometimes I have to get to a place where I even know what a specific distro expects as well as can do.

Ping diorgulescu: I'm not adept enough yet at Suse to layout a simple solution, but I am highly experienced at troubleshooting gear. Let me outline some steps you might take.

First I should offer you a note of positive encouragement. I now have 3 different PCs of different vintages with 3 different nvidia graphics cards - a GT 640, a GT 760, and a GTX 1070 Ti. As of yesterday all of them work in OpenSuse, one on 15.2 and 2 on Leap 15.3. Even though Suse didn't respond as I expected by my ingrained habit of manually editing config files, I did learn considerable and not the least of which was recognizing when the right modules were loaded. The research into the problem taught me about the many differences in audio chips, most of which also have considerable similarity (I suppose to keep things cheap, simple, and sort of "off the shelf") and the little tweaks that some require. For example apparently some Dell HDMI audio commonly needed a special workaround module tweak. I've never owned a Dell, I build my own, but it gave me substantial respect for Suse and Yast that it offers 3 different setups feature sets - Automatic, Normal, and Manual (with tweaks). I've never seen that before. It's quite cool.

Anyway ultimately my ultimate solution just came from not trying to edit files but to work with Yast, but it did help knowing what to look for. So I'd recommend using "lsmod | grep snd" on your systems that currently work and making a list of those modules. Then you can web search any idiosyncracies for hardware that uses those modules. You could try using "modprobe" for those modules in Suse. Maybe you will have better luck than I did since much of my difficulty was only on the old GT 640. The 760 and the 1070 were a breeze, basically worked OOB. I'm thinking your 1030 should setup just fine with Yast.

I did also use Alsamixer (along with aplay -l) and KDE System Settings > Audio to check my progress, so alsamixer is universal and every DE has some sort of audio interface control. As soon as I saw Nvidia HDMI show up in Alsamixer I knew it was going to work. I popped open KDE System Settings > Audio and ran the Right and Left Tests and it did. Then I setup Notifications to play Login.wav so I would always know immediately that it was still working. I've rebooted the Suse on the box with the 640 at least 2 dozen times now and it's loud and clear every time.

Incidentally I have a number of semi-pro sound cards but because the 640 and the 760 boxes are secondary machines, I wanted simplicity and less cabling, so HDMI. My Main has an Asus Essence II pro quality sound card but the trouble with the 640 caused me to try out the HDMI on the 1070 Ti just to get a feel for how HDMI is setup. I'd be all too happy if I could just dump Pulseaudio and just use ALSA, but that's another story.

Anyway I'm pretty confidant yours will work with a little effort. BTW I repeatedly got the feeling the Suse installer on a USB stick was learning and adapting because it gathered information I didn't give overtly it, and learned with repeated attempts at rescue. The final install does, too. When I first installed nvidia the hard way boot just stopped at the stupid little revolving circle animation for over 10m minutes. I rebooted and chose "Advanced" and selected rescue and it booted right up. The next time I booted I used the normal default and it did not hang ever again. It's kinda cool in a way but I actually like to know what went wrong and how it got fixed. I dislike butlers underfoot.