This reminds me of a sound card I bought way back when (22 years ago or so); it was a wavetable-supporting, Soundblaster Pro-compatible card that I got on sale for 50% off without making any effort at all to look it up online or even check the kernel for Linux support.

It worked and sounded great in Windows; it also worked and sounded great in Linux, with one exception: the card supported ISA PNP, which was great, but the kernel module for the sound card wouldn't load unless I did `cat /proc/isapnp` first.

I had no idea why, and it took a few reboots and trial-and-error to narrow it down to this janky workaround, but it worked so I just configured modprobe to run `cat /proc/isapnp > /dev/null` before trying to load the module and I never had to worry about it again.

Technology sure is weird sometimes.