Cirrus Logic "Dolphin" Audio Support Coming For Linux 5.15

Cirrus Logic has contributed a number of improvements to their CS8409 HDA audio driver for the Linux kernel that includes support for new "Dolphin" audio hardware.

Cirrus Logic open-source developers have been working on a set of more than two dozen patches for their Cirrus audio driver code for the kernel. This includes reorganizing code, support for multiple companion codecs connected to the CS8409, and new hardware support dubbed Dolphin as the successor to Cyborg.

So far this new "Dolphin" model of the CS8409 is confirmed to be used by some new Dell systems. Dolphin devices have a CS8409 HDA bridge connected to two CS42L42 codecs. It does appear Dell systems with this Dolphin audio are either to market already or coming quite soon as the support patch was already back-ported to one of Ubuntu's Linux 5.13 OEM kernel builds.

But in terms of the upstream support, all of the CS8409 patches as of yesterday made it into the sound subsystem's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.15 merge window.