Intel Plumbs SoundWire ACE2.x Support, Premiering With Lunar Lake

In addition to Lunar Lake sound driver support in Linux 6.5 and the recent SOF update for Sound Open Firmware for Lunar Lake, Linux 6.5 is also bringing initial SoundWire Intel ACE2.x support that is part of the Lunar Lake audio capabilities.

MIPI's SoundWire is a unified interface for small and low-cost audio peripherals that is used from portable devices to within automobiles and other applications. Intel has long supported SoundWire and enabled their hardware support in the Linux kernel with the SoundWire subsystem. With Linux 6.5 they are enabling their new "ACE2.x" generation IP block. This ACE2.x tech in turn is going to be premiering with Lunar Lake processor platforms.

Going back to March of this year Intel engineers have been working on the new "intel_ace2x" SoundWire driver code and now with Linux 6.5 it's ready for landing. The SoundWire ACE2.x bring-up was described by Intel engineers in their original patch series as:

"This series uses the abstraction added in past kernel cycles to provide support for the ACE2.x integration. The existing SHIM and Cadence registers are now split in 3 (SHIM, IP, SHIM vendor-specific), with some parts also moved to the HDaudio Extended Multi link structures. Nothing fundamentally different except for the register map.

This series only provides the basic mechanisms to expose SoundWire-based DAIs. The PCI parts and DSP management will be contributed later, and the DAI ops are now empty as well."

Intel ACE2.x support and the initial Lunar Lake IDs are part of the SoundWire updates submitted for Linux 6.5 that also brings new Qualcomm SoundWire 2.0 controller support.

Intel Lunar Lake CPUs aren't expected until ~2025 so until then we're still expecting to see a lot more Lunar Lake Linux patches come given the significant changes expected in that generation.