Hearing The Sound Updates For Linux 4.10

Takashi Iwai submitted all of the sound driver updates on Wednesday for the Linux 4.10 kernel. Intel Skylake audio continues to be refined but there is also a lot of other hardware driver work.

The ASoC code implements DAPM stereo mixer control support, which in turn was done for bringing up the Allwinner A31 internal codec. DAPM is short for Dynamic Audio Power Management and is further described on this Wiki page. The Allwinner A31 support was brought in via the sun4i-codec driver.

Other sound work includes a new (backwards-compatible) version of the topology ABI, clean-ups to the Intel Skylake code along with the atom-sst driver, clean-ups/updates to various other sound drivers, particularly in the ARM space. The 4.10 kernel also brings new sound drivers for the Cirrus Logic CS42L42, Qualcomm MSM8916-WCD, and Realtek RT5665. USB audio work this time includes tolerated packet size calculation for some Android devices, several quirks, and over in the HD audio space were quirks for the HP Z1 Gen3, Alienware 15 R2 2016, and ALC622.

More information on these sound changes for Linux 4.10 via this PR.