Linux 6.8 Brings More Sound Hardware Support For Intel & AMD, Including The Steam Deck

Waiting for pulling into the mainline kernel once Linus Torvalds is back online following Portland's winter storms is the sound subsystem updates for Linux 6.8, which include a lot of new sound hardware support.

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai at SUSE describes the new sound hardware support for Linux 6.8 as:

"Support for more AMD and Intel systems, NXP i.MX8m MICFIL, Qualcomm SM8250, SM8550, SM8650 and X1E80100"

The new Qualcomm additions are great to see while the most impactful sound changes are on the AMD and Intel sound support.

On the Intel side, the new Linux 6.8 sound hardware support includes adding Arrow Lake "ARL" support to their drivers for those next-generation Intel Core processors. The Arrow Lake support is tacked onto the existing Meteor Lake driver code paths both for the HDA driver and the PCI-MTL Sound Open Firmware (SOF) code. The Intel Sound Open Firmware has also seen additions for RT722 and RT5650 support. The Intel soc-acpi code has also added support for a Gen4.1 SDCA board that is being used for the Lunar Lake reference vehicle platform.

The AMD ASoC code has ACP5x platform support. This includes adding DMI table matching for the Valve Jupiter, the original Steam Deck (LCD) version. Plus there is various AMD driver changes around the rt5682s and MAX98388 codecs.

Other sound updates for Linux 6.8 include other Sound Open Firmware updates, more CS35L41 codec extensions for various Dell / HP / Lenovo laptops, and supporting the Focusrite Scarlett 4i4, 2i2, and Scarlett Solo 4th Gen USB audio mixers.

The full list of new sound patches for the Linux 6.8 kernel can be found via this pull request.