Sound Support For Intel Battlemage In Linux 6.10

Along with the various Intel Xe2 driver changes that are ongoing for the Intel Linux graphics driver stack, over in the sound subsystem the in-development Linux 6.10 kernel is bringing HDMI audio support for upcoming Intel Battlemage graphics cards.

Longtime sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE explained of the updates for v6.10:

"This one became bigger than usual, not in the total size but rather containing lots of small changes all over the places. The majority of changes are about ASoC, especially SOF / Intel stuff, and we see an interesting work for ASoC DAPM graph visualization, while there are many other code cleanup and refactoring, too."

Indeed there are a lot of Intel changes with continued work around enhancing their Sound Open Firmware (SOF) stack. Throughout the multiple Intel audio drivers there is a lot of work. There are also new drivers for the Nuvoton NAU8325, Rockchip RK3308 and Texas Instruments PCM6240. The emu10k1 driver has also seen a number of fixes and enhancements.

When pouring through the dozens of Intel audio driver patches for Linux 6.10, one of them caught my eye: "hda: Add Intel BMG PCI ID and HDMI codec vid." Checking out the patch, yes, it's Intel Battlemage! The Intel HDA audio driver has been extended to support HDMI audio on the upcoming Intel Battlemage graphics cards.

It's great seeing the Intel Battlemage open-source Linux support coming together and hopefully by the time these Xe2 dGPUs launch there will be pleasant out-of-the-box support for Linux gamers/enthusiasts.

The full set of sound driver patches for Linux 6.10 can be found via this pull request.