New Sound Drivers & UAC3 Ready To Play On Linux 4.17

Longtime Linux sound system maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE has sent in his album of updates for the Linux 4.17 kernel.

First and foremost with the Linux 4.17 sound updates is the USB Audio Class 3.0 support we previously wrote about on Phoronix. USB Audio Class 3.0 (UAC3) is a 2016 audio-over-USB specification promoted as "USB Audio over USB Type-C" and brought power management improvements, additional interrupt sources, new descriptors, and other changes while still maintaining backwards compatibility with UAC2. UAC3 is now supported by the mainline Linux kernel plus for the existing UAC2 support they now have working jack detection.

Over in the ASoC space, they continue working on reworking the drivers into a components framework. There are also many fixes and clean-ups throughout, especially if you are an Intel BayTrail or CherryTrail user there are a number of fixes.

New sound drivers in the Linux 4.17 kernel include support for the following codecs: AKM AK4458/AK5558, Maxim MAX9759, Motorola CPCAP, and TI PCM1789/TDA7419. There is also now support for Socionext Unipher SoCs and there are some new machine drivers for some AMD systems as well as Intel Kabylake. The Intel Icelake PCI ID has also been added to the HDA driver.

The complete list of sound changes for the 4.17 kernel can be found via today's pull request.