Linux 6.8 Brings More Sound Hardware Support For Intel & AMD, Including The Steam Deck

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Linux 6.8 Brings More Sound Hardware Support For Intel & AMD, Including The Steam Deck

Waiting for pulling into the mainline kernel once Linus Torvalds is back online following Portland's winter storms is the sound subsystem updates for Linux 6.8, which include a lot of new sound hardware support...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.8-Sound

[kylew77]

Nice to hear Linux sound getting better. Wish BSD sound was getting better. My ThinkPad from based on Zen 2 AMD at first didn't have sound on OpenBSD 7.3 but when the devs released AMD microcode updates in a patch it magically started working, but a recent update in 7.4 bricked the sound, but strangely the headphone chip still works! It is even plug and play. Trying to track down what the problem is...

[unwind-protect]

I thought the Focusrite 2i2 is USB class compliant?

[Kjell]

I'm really confused about Sound Open Firmware

If my audio is currently working fine (Realtek inside the motherboard which uses driver 'snd_hda_intel'), are there any benefita to installing sof-firmware over alsa-firmware?

[aviallon]

I'm really confused about Sound Open Firmware

If my audio is currently working fine (Realtek inside the motherboard which uses driver 'snd_hda_intel'), are there any benefita to installing sof-firmware over alsa-firmware?

I believe not. It always depends on what hardware you have. If all of your hardware is behaving 100% as expected, you don't need anything more.

Actually, according to their page : https://www.sofproject.org/
Using SOF has the benefit of not using a proprietary blob.

[Adarion]

I thought the Focusrite 2i2 is USB class compliant?

Well, as far as I know it is. So it basically works to get something out there, but any advanced features won't work.
"Real" drivers are sadly often still better than generic things, as we still have to deal with non-standard-conform behaviour and quirks all over the place, regardless what device you look at.