AMD SoundWire Merged For Linux 6.4

[phoronix]

Phoronix: AMD SoundWire Merged For Linux 6.4

Going back to 2016 Intel began working on MIPI SoundWire support for Linux and now in 2023, AMD has joined the party with their initial AMD SoundWire support driver landing in the mainline kernel...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-SoundWire-Linux-6.4

[Jabberwocky]

First thing that came to mind was MIDI (and then the instant guitar pro nostalgia). I realized that this is something completely different.

Soundwire is apparently for Microphone arrays, Stereophonic and surround sound, Low-latency multichannel audio transfers and as Michael said: "A comprehensive, unified interface for small audio peripherals".

Looks like it's used to consume sources from FM radio or Bluetooth and sync that out to multiple DACs/ADCs nodes. Maybe something Tesla is using?

https://www.mipi.org/specifications/soundwire

[WiR3D]

To be honest I really don't get this, or Sound open firmware... I'm total sound nut, spend stupid time tweaking alsa and using specific players that bypass pulseaudio /pipewire with 24bit flac files feeding to a meridian xplorer dac/amp then denon D7000, and believe it or not my ears hear a difference in the tweaks.

So I WANT to understand the userland implications, I just don't. Wouldn't mind if someone could bridge the gap for me though

[stormcrow]

To be honest I really don't get this, or Sound open firmware... I'm total sound nut, spend stupid time tweaking alsa and using specific players that bypass pulseaudio /pipewire with 24bit flac files feeding to a meridian xplorer dac/amp then denon D7000, and believe it or not my ears hear a difference in the tweaks.

So I WANT to understand the userland implications, I just don't. Wouldn't mind if someone could bridge the gap for me though

Digging a little deeper, the only thing I've found is what MIPI actually is... (which should have been explained in the article). I recommend Wikipedia over just visiting their website for a better summary.

But even then there's no useful high level summary of what SoundWire actually is. The MIPI page on it is utterly useless. Like most people, I'm automatically suspicious of any computer standards organizations that refuse to even publish a high level overview for the interested public. That suggests there's something in there they don't want people to know such as DRM enforcement and/or patent encumbered codecs.

Regardless, this seems to be related to positional or spacial audio. The ability for one system to combine inputs from multiple audio inputs and then use the SoundWire glue spec to mix them so that the output faithfully recreates the environment. That's my guess anyway. Less hardware to do more.

[cronius]

I did some digging as well, and as far as I can tell SoundWire is a hardware spec and protocol in the same way as USB Audio Class, except for everything, not just USB devices, and it supports more features and use cases. Specifically it is advertised for hardware makers to make their devices driverless because the OS does everything. This is of course great news for us Linux users, since we have seemingly good SoundWire support.

Transport of the protocol I think is USB, PCIe etc, but applications can probably provide over network too.

I'm guessing that after this patch is merged AMD users might see a SoundWire device popup somewhere (either in pipewire or in alsa or something). Intel users on recent hardware should already have that.

Random source: https://www.mipi.org/blog/mipi-sound...dio-interfaces