Sound Open Firmware 2.1 Released With Better Performance, More Zephyr RTOS Usage

Last week Intel engineers released Sound Open Firmware 2.1, the newest feature update to their open-source audio DSP firmware stack that has also begun seeing some AMD support and other platforms too like NXP i.MX8.

Since announcing Sound Open Firmware back in 2018, the open-source project has been making steady progress and a clear focus by Intel for their newer hardware platforms. Sound Open Firmware 2.1 brings performance improvements around its copy functions as well as enhancements to its processing code paths. Sound Open Firmware 2.1 also boasts greater stability, especially for Intel cAVS platforms.

Sound Open Firmware 2.1 also switches from XTOS to the Zephyr RTOS for the community builds for Apollo Lake and i.MX8 platforms. The Zephyr real-time operating system continues to be backed by the Linux Foundation with Intel being a heavy supporter of the project.

The SOF Project

Over on the Windows side, Sound Open Firmware 2.1 has initial support for the Windows Media Player on Tiger Lake Windows systems using the IPC4 protocol.

More details on the Sound Open Firmware 2.1 changes via GitHub.