Legacy Intel Sound Driver Support Being Removed In Linux 6.12, Other Big Changes

Yet another early pull request for the imminent Linux 6.12 merge window is the sound (audio) driver updates for this next kernel cycle. There is a lot of sound driver work this cycle from new audio bits to removing legacy Intel driver support.

The sound changes for Linux 6.12 bring new optimized locking code within the ALSA control handling, enhanced DMA API usage thanks to code rewrites, various ASoC driver clean-ups, support for multiple control interfaces within the USB audio code, support for the RME Digiface USB hardware, and new sound hardware support.

The RME Digiface is a USB portable digital audio interface that retails for north of $600 USD and needless to say is some high-end audio gear. The RME Digiface USB supports 66 channels (32 in / 34 out), 4 x ADAT / SPDIF optical inputs, 24-bit / 192 kHz digital audio, and is designed for Windows and macOS use but now works too under Linux.

Other new audio hardware support in Linux 6.12 includes the AMD Audio Co-Processor (AMD ACP) 7.1, Mediatek MT6367 and MT8365, Realtek RTL1320 SoundWire and rev C, and Texas Instruments TAS2563 hardware. Plus various new Intel and AMD machine additions were added.

Linux 6.12 is also set to clear out legacy Intel drivers that were deprecated by the newer Intel AVS audio drivers. So fear not, legacy drivers are being removed but it doesn't lead to loss of hardware support. The Intel AVS audio driver code landed in recent years to replace older Broxton, Kabylake, Skylake, and Cannonlake era driver support.

So in turn all of the sound feature changes for Linux 6.12 is 25k lines of new code but 32.6k lines of code are being removed.

More details on the more-than-normal level of sound changes for this next Linux kernel version via this pull request.