Intel Audio Driver Adding "AlderLake-PS" Support With Linux 5.18

The open-source Intel HDA audio driver for Linux already supports Alder Lake S, P, M, and N series of processors while now there is support being added for "AlderLake-PS" as a seemingly yet to be announced variant.

Alder Lake P makes up the P-series mobile processors along with Alder Lake H and U. Alder Lake S is, of course, their desktop processors. The Intel HDA audio driver for Linux already had two PCI IDs for Alder Lake P with 0x51c8 and 0x51cd, but now an "AlderLake-PS" variant is being added. This new Alder Lake P series PCI ID is 0x51c9.

The Alder Lake S support for the Intel HDA Linux driver was added in late 2020 and Alder Lake P in January 2021 (followed by Alder Lake M in May 2021 and Alder Lake N last December). That's keeping up with Intel's usual very early Linux hardware enablement support that has been quite nice over the past many years. Thus further piquing our interest now about the Alder Lake PS variant given Intel's usual very timely Linux support and Linux 5.18 won't be out as stable until the end of May or so. Additionally, to date I haven't seen any other mentions within the Linux kernel sources or elsewhere to "AlderLake-PS" nor in reference to the 0x51c9 PCI ID being added.

So for now there isn't much else to add besides audio support is coming for an Alder Lake "PS" variant, whatever that may be - it may be something interesting or could be some obscure/special-case variant. The patch was added last week to the sound subsystem's "for-next" branch ahead of the Linux 5.18 merge window opening next week.