Linux 5.14 Picks Up Support For New Sound Hardware, Including Alder Lake M

Linux 5.14 is ready to begin supporting some new sound hardware while some recently proposed USB audio latency improvements were rejected for now.

The sound subsystem updates were sent in on Friday. As written about last month there has been work on lowering the latency for the USB audio driver. While sent in as part of Friday's merge request, Linus Torvalds ended up rejecting that change. After pulling the changes he was getting a hang on one of his systems. There is already a possible fix pending so we'll see if the USB latency audio reduction work is re-sent in next week for Linux 5.14 or held off until 5.15.

What did land besides a number of new sound adapters being supported are some suspend related improvements, merging of the multiple NVIDIA Tegra machine drivers into a single driver, quirks for various USB-based Ozone and Denon devices, quirks for some HP and ASUS laptops with their HD audio support, and refactoring of the Firewire code.

New audio hardware support for Linux 5.14 includes:

- Intel AlderLake-M (other Alder Lake variants previously added)
- AmLogic SM1 TOACODEC
- Several NXP i.MX8 variants
- NXP TFA1 and TDF9897
- Rockchip RK817
- Qualcomm Quinary MI2S
- Texas Instruments TAS2505

The full list of sound changes for Linux 5.14 can be found via this PR.