Sound Open Firmware 2.0 Released For The Intel-Led Open-Source DSP Stack

It was nearly four years ago already that Intel announced Sound Open Firmware in pushing for open-source sound firmware for their hardware. The Sound Open Firmware effort has been a great success even if it's not a shiny project widely talked about among consumers. Just prior to the holidays Sound Open Firmware 2.0 was quietly released.

The Sound Open Firmware project provides an open-source digital signal processing (DSP) firmware stack and software development kit around it as well as open-source emulation support with QEMU, etc. Beyond the firmware itself the Linux kernel has the Sound Open Firmware host driver support and the SOF driver stack is dual-licensed under both the BSD and GPL. More details on the SOF project can be found via the project documentation.

Sound Open Firmware

With Sound Open Firmware 2.0, there are performance improvements stemming from the copy functions that lead to some processing code paths consuming as much as 40% less cycles than SOF 1.9 while maintaining the same audio quality. There is also stability improvements with SOF 2.0, the Zephyr RTOS is now used instead of XTOS for the community release for the APL platform, and support for basic playback/capture on some Tiger Lake Windows-based devices with the IPC4 protocol.

Downloads and more information on the Sound Open Firmware 2.0 project via GitHub.