Email to Realtek about issues in their sound driver

This is the email I sent to Realtek related email addresses on 3/December/2009.
I sent it to: kailang@realtek.com.tw, shou@realtek.com.tw, and from their Contact section in their webpage.
I hope that posting it here in public, they feel a bit more ashamed.
I haven't received a minimal answer 5 months later. I wonder how important are users for them once that they have bought their product. Do they care a minimum?

Hello,

my name is Pablo and I own a tablet PC "HP TX2000es" (spanish version of HP TX2000).

My cause of my email is that the current linux driver for the realtek model of sound card I own isn't optimum. And I think it would be the same for the others, not only in the spanish model.

Currently I'm using Ubuntu 9.10 which runs 2.6.31-15-generic and today I have downloaded 2.6.32 to see the changes but it seems that there were not improves on it.

The troubles I have found so far are:

- By default, when you connect your headphones the sound continues being played through the speakers.
I solved it by loading snd-hda-intel with the parameter model=hp. But instead, when I load snd-hda-intel like that, the microphone stops working (is not detected, none of both).
So the current scenario is to choose between using microphone or hearing the speakers with headsets.

I have also tried with other model parameters like model=6stack-digout or model=3stack but it's like by default (speakers continue playing).


According to lspci, my device is:
00:10.1 Audio device: nVidia Corporation MCP51 High Definition Audio (rev a2)

00:10.1 0403: 10de:026c (rev a2)
    Subsystem: 103c:30e5
    Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B- DisINTx-
    Status: Cap+ 66MHz+ UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- SERR-
    Latency: 0 (500ns min, 1250ns max)
    Interrupt: pin B routed to IRQ 17
    Region 0: Memory at 80020000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
    Capabilities:
    Kernel driver in use: HDA Intel
    Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel


I have seen there is a macro SND_PCI_QUIRK in
/usr/src/linux-source-2.6.31/sound/pci/hda/patch_realtek.c that is used with specific models of this laptop:

patch_realtek.c:12526:    SND_PCI_QUIRK_MASK(0x103c, 0xff00, 0x3000, "HP TX25xx series", ALC268_TOSHIBA),

patch_realtek.c:15171:    SND_PCI_QUIRK(0x103c, 0x30bf, "HP TX1000", ALC861VD_HP),

But there's no QUIRK for 103c:30e5 (my model)


I hope I explained well myself and you could understand my problem (well, the problem of all owners of this model) and you can now help us to solve it. I have no experience with the kernel.

Please contact me if you need to test new patches or you need more information.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
    Pablo.