On Fri, 23 Sep 2022 14:50:37 -0500
John Morris <jmorris(a)beau.org> wrote:
It isn't nearly so simple. The PC "squeeker" is
ancient PC tech but
almost every sound chip has an input to route it into the rest of the
audio system and a mixer control to adjust it. Almost every PC
motherboard also has a header to directly connect a speaker. This
allows one to hear sounds created by the BIOS during POST, before the
modern audio chip is initialized.
Whether the motherboard or laptop actually connects the PC Speaker to
the audio codec is almost entirely random. Whether anything is
connected to the raw "squeeker" pins is random but tending more toward
"not" every year that passes.
Not allowing Linux to load the pcspeaker module will stop Linux from
ever making a sound via that path but system level software running at
higher privilege than the main OS can and often does use the speaker,
over temp, fan failure, POST error, a happy beep at boot, all these
things can still make sounds and there is a speaker attached or if the
electrical connection is in place and the audio codec still has it
enabled as a machine reboots, you can get beeps.
About the only fix Linux could make is to ensure all audio channels
are muted as the system goes into shutdown, reboot, sleep or suspend.
That still won't stop a directly connected beeper though.
Thanks for the information. I hear no beeps ever, so my system must be
without any issues, or one of the random ones without a tie to the
onboard sound chip.