AC97 sound problems with current

[orion at freebsd.org (Orion Hodson)]

Kevin Oberman writes:
| More information on my AC97 experiences:
|
| I forced the card to 4.8 KHz which is what it was running at on V4. This
| seems to have not helped the performance of GnomeMeeting at all. The
| sound I hear is in "spurts" which are at the correct frequency and last
| about a tenth of a second. with gaps between them of about 1 second.

Is 4.8kHz a typo?  It should be 48kHz or 55913Hz depending on your h/w.  Which 
of the two is all the calibration test is supposed to determine.  Some ac97 
controllers on ich based systems seem to end up using an alternate clock 
source: XTAL_IN rather than BIT_CLK.  The former clocks the AC97 link at 
around 55913Hz when it should be at 48kHz.  It wasn't clear to me until 
recently that this was what was happening and until some more testing is done 
I'm not sure if it's a feature of the ich driver ac97 initialization or just 
the way it is.

I'm currently configuring a laptop to be a netboot server and will sneak up on 
an unsuspecting ich machine in the next couple of days and endeavor to resolve 
the problem in situ (right now I'm dog tired of exchanging patches for remote 
h/w, but that's not to say the offers are not appreciated in general).

- Orion