fbsd-11-imac-2008-audio.txt

Issue with sound in FBSD 11.1 on 20" iMac Early 2008 (iMac8,1)

I recently (yesterday) installed FreeBSD 11.1 as the sole OS on my iMac.
I have KDE installed and working.
I tried a youtube video in firefox, and no sounds came from the speakers (which worked fine in Mac OS X)
I tried sudo cat /dev/random /dev/dsp, and no sound

Here are loader.conf, sndstat, and dmesg messages that seem to indicate "it oughta work"

How should I go about finding out if there is a misconfiguration?

sudo cat /boot/loader.conf
...
snd_hda_load="YES"

sudo cat /dev/sndstat
Installed devices:
pcm0: <Realtek ALC889A (Internal Analog 3.1/2.0)> (play/rec) default
pcm1: <Realtek ALC889A (Rear Analog)> (play/rec)
pcm2: <Realtek ALC889A (Rear Digital)> (play/rec)
No devices installed from userspace.

dmesg|grep pcm
pcm0: <Realtek ALC889A (Internal Analog 3.1/2.0)> at nid 20,22 and 24 on hdaa0
pcm1: <Realtek ALC889A (Rear Analog)> at nid 21 and 26 on hdaa0
pcm2: <Realtek ALC889A (Rear Digital)> at nid 30 and 31 on hdaa0


Here are some relevant system specs:
iMac 20 inch Aluminum, early 2008, iMac8,1
Native Resolution - 1680x1050 32-Bit Color
Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.4 GHz
6GB 800MHz DDR 2 SDRAM
ATI Radeon HD 2400 PCIe GPU 128MB VRAM
Intel High Definition Audio

Solution:
sudo vi /boot/device.hints
hint.hdaa.0.config="ovref"
hint.hdaa.0.gpio_config="0=set"
hint.hdaa.0.nid20.config="as=4 seq=15"