Sounds stops working sporadically, restart is required

[D-FENS]

Hi,

I experience a strange problem where the sounds suddenly stops working and nothing helps except for restarting the machine.
All audio playbacks halt, for example Youtube videos, Audacious, mpv/mplayer. The progress simply stays at one place.

This happens sporadically, but quite often. Mostly when two programs start playback in parallel.

I have an AMD Threadripper 1950X CPU on ASUS PRIME X399 board, AMD Radeon RX 580 GPU.
The audio card is the on-board audio, although the GPU's HDMI audio is also detected but I don't use it.

% pciconf -vl | grep -ni audio
235:    device     = 'Family 17h (Models 00h-0fh) HD Audio Controller'
310:    device     = 'Ellesmere HDMI Audio [Radeon RX 470/480 / 570/580/590]'

The Kernel is latest from Subversion: 12.0-RELEASE-p3, packages are all up to date, installed via pkg.
My desktop is KDE.
I use pulseaudio, and tried to restart pulse but this didn't help. I don't know if this message is relevant (it is the same also when the sound works):

W: [(null)] caps.c: Normally all extra capabilities would be dropped now, but that's impossible because PulseAudio was built without capabilities support.

Also does not detect the device (also in good and bad case the message is the same):

% aplay -l
aplay: device_list:273: no soundcards found...

dmesg does not show anything when the sound dies

 

[Cath O'Deray]

… Someone told me it's probably the CPU which is kind of tweaked to work on the edge of possible and by design has some micro crashes that mess up the kernel from time to time. I don't know how to validate that.

After giving up I installed Linux on the machine and since then I have never ever seen the bug. The hardware is probably tweaked to the Linux drivers by AMD and unfortunately they did not invest in tuning FreeBSD too. …

… AMD Radeon RX 580 … GPU's HDMI audio is also detected but I don't use it. …

Defocusing from AMD …

For what it's worth, <https://github.com/helloSystem/ISO/issues/198#issue-846889779> reports no sound on HDMI with NVIDIA GM107 High Definition Audio Controller [GeForce 940MX]), however the report lacks detail; and critically (for helloSystem) it should be assumed that base OS patches have not been applied.

Previously:

No sound over HDMI on Intel Broadwell HDA Controller · Issue #7 · helloSystem/ISO

Sound over HDMI is not working on Acer RevoOne RL85.

github.com

– presumably non-patched FreeBSD 11.4-RELEASE.

 

[D-FENS]

and critically (for helloSystem) it should be assumed that base OS patches have not been applied.

FYI: My OS at the time was patched to the latest state (2019). I tried two minor releases.
P.S. Regarding your links, I was not using HDMI not because it did not work but because my current amp does not have an HDMI input and it's not convenient for me hardwarewise. Generally I was able to get sound out via HDMI.