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Fedora Preparing To Switch To Intel's Modern "Sound Open Firmware" Audio Driver

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  • Fedora Preparing To Switch To Intel's Modern "Sound Open Firmware" Audio Driver

    Phoronix: Fedora Preparing To Switch To Intel's Modern "Sound Open Firmware" Audio Driver

    Fedora 34 is planning to switch to using Intel's modern Sound Open Firmware audio driver as it should be in good shape now and superior to the existing sound driver. This is ahead of Intel likely switching to the Intel SOF driver code path by default in the upstream kernel once this change has first been vetted by Fedora users...

    Phoronix, Linux Hardware Reviews, Linux hardware benchmarks, Linux server benchmarks, Linux benchmarking, Desktop Linux, Linux performance, Open Source graphics, Linux How To, Ubuntu benchmarks, Ubuntu hardware, Phoronix Test Suite

  • #2
    On a semi-related note, it'd be nice if QEMU/KVM could support an audio driver / virtual device that supports more than stereo. AFAIK, unless you do hardware passthrough, you only have options like passing guest audio through to PulseAudio but the guest emulated audio is limited to stereo, so if you have more speakers or a subwoofer, you can't leverage it. Probably such a niche thing that nobody can be bothered contributing an improvement?

    Perhaps on linux guests there is also a better way to pass audio from guest to host? Not sure about windows or macos guests though.

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    • #3
      Originally posted by polarathene View Post
      On a semi-related note, it'd be nice if QEMU/KVM could support an audio driver / virtual device that supports more than stereo. AFAIK, unless you do hardware passthrough, you only have options like passing guest audio through to PulseAudio but the guest emulated audio is limited to stereo, so if you have more speakers or a subwoofer, you can't leverage it. Probably such a niche thing that nobody can be bothered contributing an improvement?

      Perhaps on linux guests there is also a better way to pass audio from guest to host? Not sure about windows or macos guests though.
      Both my Sennheiser GSX 1200 and Steelseries Arctis 7 only have mono support in Linux. I typically use my DAC in windows VM (via USB hardware passthrough) and sometimes use my Arctis via Libvirt USB redirection (connected to Linux host), hardware passthrough works perfectly and there's just a tiny noticeable difference with USB redirection. IIRC the emulated audio wasn't that bad, perhaps it's a guest driver issue? I think it was coded for windows XP... have not used it in 6 years, so I could mistake it for something else.

      I tried the PA (PulseAudio) route once but gave up on it after spending too many hours to get it to work. It was easier to get PA working with a fake sound card and redirecting sound over the network to my Linux PA server with a custom built windows PA client. I don't know why things have to be so difficult (undocumented/unmaintained). That said...

      I reciently went over Mathias' guides, it's quite good. It could help you https://mathiashueber.com/virtual-ma...audio-working/

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      • #4
        This looks super cool actually, and finally something where multiple hardware vendors are on board to define a lot of things in common, and make it work both across CPU host architectures and vendors, and SoC / DSP implementations. For so long the ecosystem was so fragmented. I hope AMD and Realtek gets on board with that too.

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        • #5
          Originally posted by polarathene View Post
          On a semi-related note, it'd be nice if QEMU/KVM could support an audio driver / virtual device that supports more than stereo. AFAIK, unless you do hardware passthrough, you only have options like passing guest audio through to PulseAudio but the guest emulated audio is limited to stereo, so if you have more speakers or a subwoofer, you can't leverage it. Probably such a niche thing that nobody can be bothered contributing an improvement?

          Perhaps on linux guests there is also a better way to pass audio from guest to host? Not sure about windows or macos guests though.
          It was a proposal back in 2017 google Summer of Code, not sure if it evolved into something, apparently there exist patches but they are not mainlined.

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          • #6
            Originally posted by polarathene View Post
            On a semi-related note, it'd be nice if QEMU/KVM could support an audio driver / virtual device that supports more than stereo. AFAIK, unless you do hardware passthrough, you only have options like passing guest audio through to PulseAudio but the guest emulated audio is limited to stereo, so if you have more speakers or a subwoofer, you can't leverage it. Probably such a niche thing that nobody can be bothered contributing an improvement?

            Perhaps on linux guests there is also a better way to pass audio from guest to host? Not sure about windows or macos guests though.
            If you don't need a separate LFE channel, you can configure Pulseaudio to output 2.1 using software x-over if you have mono or stereo input.

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            • #7
              So if I understood correctly, this is mainly used by mobile Intel platforms? Do I need this on desktop or when using a USB DAC?

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              • #8
                Will this be used by current (3-7 years old) hardware or only on future generations?

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                • #9
                  More like 2 years old hardware. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php...h=sof-firmware

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                  • #10
                    is this a general sound card driver? i really don't understand what this is
                    what hardware is supported by this?

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