AMD SoundWire Driver For Linux Coming Together

Going back to 2016 Intel began work on the SoundWire support for Linux, the MIPI standard started in 2014 to help consolidate audio interfaces between PC and mobile hardware. In preparation for seemingly new AMD hardware coming to market with SoundWire support, AMD engineers recently began working on an AMD SoundWire driver.

In 2018 with Linux 4.16 the SoundWire subsystem was merged for that code led by Intel engineers for handling this low-power, two-wire sound bus set forth by the MIPI Alliance. The SoundWire support within the kernel has continued to improve while AMD is now working on their driver support.

As a refresher, MIPI describes the SoundWire specification as being for "cost-sensitive audio peripherals" and:

"MIPI SoundWire®, introduced in 2014, consolidates many of the key attributes in mobile and PC audio interfaces, providing a common, comprehensive interface and scalable architecture that can be used to enable audio features and functions in multiple types of devices and across market segments. It supports the use of advanced amplifiers and microphones. In addition, it can also optimize speaker protection, microphone power and performance, noise cancellation and always-listening audio input."

I haven't seen SoundWire mentioned by AMD in the past so presumably this is for some upcoming, unreleased hardware. Though in the driver patches there are references to the ACP 6.x IP block for the AMD Audio Co-Processor. ACP 6.x first premiered with AMD Rembrandt laptops so it's possible there is SoundWire support with the very recent AMD mobile platforms. Searching for "AMD" and "SoundWire" mostly just returns results to these new in-development Linux driver patches.

Last week saw the latest patch series for the AMD SoundWire driver still being reviewed. It's too late for the Linux v6.3 kernel but we'll see if this AMD SoundWire code is readied for v6.4 in the summer.