SOF 2.6 Released: Intel Already Preparing Sound Open Firmware For Lunar Lake

Sound Open Firmware 2.6 was released on Thursday for this Intel-started open-source software project for having a fully open audio DSP firmware stack and related development tooling. While initially limited to Intel hardware support, SOF has since grown and seen support from the likes of Mediatek, Realtek, NXP, and even recent AMD SoCs.

Sound Open Firmware 2.6 most notably introduces support for the NXP i.MX93 as well as having initial support for Intel Lunar Lake. Lunar Lake is the generation after Arrow Lake, which in turn is succeeding Meteor Lake. Thus we're not expecting to see Lunar Lake until at least 2025 but their open-source Linux developers have already been busy working on various elements of the driver support. Lunar Lake is expected to bring some significant changes and Intel has long been known for their timely Linux support, so this early work-in-progress code ultimately isn't too surprising.

Sound Open Firmware 2.6 also brings various audio performance optimizations, Intel cAVS2.5 native Zephyr platform support, initial support for non built-in binaries, and support for running SOF as a Zephyr POSIX target on Linux. The SOF support as a Zephyr POSIX target is intended to ease development of this audio DSP firmware and help for situations like fuzzing the code.

Downloads and more details on Sound Open Firmware 2.6 via SOFProject.org.