Initial Sound Open Firmware Support For AMD Hardware Comes With Linux 5.17

The sound subsystem updates have been merged into the Linux 5.17 kernel with a few notable hardware driver additions this cycle.

First up, there is initial Sound Open Firmware "SOF" support for AMD. The AMD Renoir Audio Co-Processor is now supported with Sound Open Firmware (SOF). The Renoir ACP was previously supported on Linux outside of the SOF path. Back in November when the patches first surfaced I wrote more about Sound Open Firmware coming to AMD hardware with the Renoir audio co-processor being the first supported target.

Sound Open Firmware

Sound Open Firmware was started by Intel and now runs as a Linux Foundation project for having an open-source audio DSP firmware and SDK for modern audio processing. Besides Intel and now AMD, other hardware like some Mediatek SoCs are also seeing Sound Open Firmware support. See the aforelinked article for more details and my other Sound Open Firmware writings over the years.

Across a number of patches now merged, the first AMD support for Sound Open Firmware can be enabled with Renoir hardware in Linux 5.17.

Also notable with the sound updates for Linux 5.17 is HDA support for the Cirrus CS35L41 HD audio codec. With that is getting that HD audio codec working nicely on a few Lenovo laptops.

Other new ASoC support includes Asahi Kasei Microdevices AKM4375, Intel hardware with NAU8825 and MAX98390, Mediatek MT8915, NVIDIA Tegra20 S/PDIF, Qualcomm hardware using ALC5682I-VS and Texas Instruments TLV320ADC3xxx. There is also Alder Lake N audio support part of this merge.

More details on the Linux 5.17 sound changes via this pull request by SUSE's Takashi Iwai that has since been merged to mainline.