https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39832

--- Comment #16 from Alex Deucher alexdeucher@gmail.com 2011-09-02 14:33:03 --- (In reply to comment #15)

I think the problem is that the audio device is *advertised* as working, although it doesn't. radeon should just stop advertising audio if radeon.audio isn't set.

The GPU driver doesn't advertise/handle the audio device. The alsa driver does. All the GPU driver does is enable the audio packets in the HDMI stream. I don't think there's a way for the gpu driver to tell the alsa driver not to load. Moreover, there are audio devices on certain boards with where the audio can be sent to either hdmi or regular audio ports so you would still want it that case.