[Cbe-oss-dev] mixer unavailable in latest git kernels

[weltall]

I've been building the kernel almost daily/weekly for some months and I
ever had any problem with the mixer. But after the 4th of july (it's the
date of the latest kernel which works fine, and i have still it on disk
and it still works without a problem) The gnome mixer started segnaling
an x near the speaker icon and clicking on it returned an error like
(i'm translating as the error isn't in english because of my
configurations) "No plugin of gstreamer or mixer found".
Trying to launch alsamixer returns just this error:
[root at HostA16 boot]# alsamixer 
No mixer elems found

I've tried various combinations: compiling with my own configurations,
with make ps3_defconfig and also removing completely the copy which I
updated with git pull and git cloned it again but with completely no
success.
Except the mixer not being accessible the device seems to work fine: the
oss emulation of also can reproduce sounds and also doing mplayer -ao
alsa worked perfectly. I can even see and select the "PS3 Audio Device"
from the gnome sound card configuration tool.
I'm running Yellow dog linux with the latest kernel from the git on
kernel.org:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/geoff/ps3-linux.git
These are more detailed informations about the distribution:
[root at HostA16 boot]# lsb_release  -a
LSB
Version:    :core-3.0-noarch:core-3.0-ppc32:graphics-3.0-noarch:graphics-3.0-ppc32
Distributor ID: YellowDog
Description:    Yellow Dog Linux release 5.0 (Phoenix)
Release:        5.0
Codename:       Phoenix
[root at HostA16 boot]# uname -a
Linux HostA16 2.6.22-g8781780a #2 SMP Wed Jul 18 18:38:44 CEST 2007
ppc64 ppc64 ppc64 GNU/Linux
I hope these are enough to find the problem
Thanks in advance for any help