Testing Intel SOF drivers

I received an email from A. Franc, reporting that audio does not work on a Huawei Matebook D14 laptop. It seems that Intel's SOF drivers are needed, not HDA (the legacy drivers).

I have been down this path before, now taking another look at it. Have compiled the kernel with SOF enabled, but only for fairly recent SoCs:

However, on my Asus Zenbook 2024-model, with Intel Core Ultra 7-155U SoC, which I think is the MeteorLake or ArrowLake family, audio output cannot be found.

This is the path that I have been down before. Heaps of online posts about SOF not working when update to the 6.12.x kernel, and all recommendations are to go back to the HDA drivers. There are various kernel commandline parameters to achieve this, and I tested this one in limine.cfg:

KERNEL_CMDLINE=snd_intel_dspcfg.dsp_driver=1 ...

...yes, now audio works.

I want audio to work "out of the box", don't want people to have to go hunting online.

There is something else, the AVS drivers, that I had previously tried:

https://bkhome.org/news/202502/intel-sound-avs-driver-still-too-immature.html

...so maybe need to enable both SOF and AVS. Alright, will give that a go, but hope that I'm not just going down a rabbit hole.

Just checked, Google AI reports this:

No, Intel SOF (Sound Open Firmware) drivers do not need the AVS (Audio-Voice-Speech) system; they are separate, though related, components within Intel's audio driver architecture, with SOF providing the firmware platform and AVS referring to a newer, specific driver for older Intel platforms like Skylake. SOF is a more general platform designed to work with various codecs and machine drivers, including those for newer CPUs, while AVS is a newer, open-source driver under development to replace older drivers for Skylake and similar era hardware.

...hmmm, I'll enable both anyway, see what happens.  

Tags: easy