Linux 6.1 Brings New Sound Drivers For AMD & Apple

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai on Wednesday submitted all of the sound driver updates for Linux 6.1.

There is a lot of new sound hardware support with Linux 6.1, including for AMD devices, early sound support for Apple Silicon with the M1 and M2, improvements to existing Intel hardware support, and a lot of mobile hardware work.

Highlights for the sound changes in Linux 6.1 include:

- Support for AMD Rembrandt with the Sound Open Firmware code, complementing the existing AMD Cezanne platform support in SOF. Great seeing AMD continuing to embrace SOF, presumably as part of their Chromebook play.

- AMD's Pink Sardine Audio Co-Processor 6.2 (ACP 6.2) is now supported. This Pink Sardine audio driver appeared back in August and is now being mainlined. It's not clear what Pink Sardine correlates to on AMD's roadmap but may be for the "Phoenix" mobile APUs or perhaps the Mendocino budget APUs.

- The new "SOC_APPLE_MCA" driver for enabling the ASoC platform driver for MCA peripherals found with Apple Silicon SoCs. This Apple Silicon sound driver was started by the Asahi Linux developers and successfully tested with both the Apple M1 and M2 hardware.

- Improvements to the Sound Open Firmware (SOF) IPC4 code.

- Mediatek MT8186 audio support.

- Support for the NXP i.MX8ULP DSPs.

- Qualcomm SC8280XP / SM8250 / SM8450 support.

More details on these sound changes, which have already been merged, via the pull request.