No sound cards detected on Kabylake laptops after upgrade to kernel 5.8

[Amadeusz Sławiński]

On 3/11/2021 11:24 AM, Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
> Dne 11. 03. 21 v 6:50 Chris Chiu napsal(a):
>> On Tue, Mar 9, 2021 at 11:29 PM Cezary Rojewski
>> <cezary.rojewski at intel.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2021-03-09 1:19 PM, Chris Chiu wrote:
>>>> Hi Guys,
>>>>       We have received reports that on some Kabylake laptops (Acer Swift
>>>> SF314-54/55 and Lenovo Yoga C930...etc), all sound cards no longer be
>>>> detected after upgrade to kernel later than 5.8. These laptops have
>>>> one thing in common, all of them have Realtek audio codec and connect
>>>> the internal microphone to DMIC of the Intel SST controller either
>>>> [8086:9d71] or [8086:9dc8]. Please refer to
>>>> https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=201251#c246 and
>>>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1915117.
>>>>
>>>>       From the dmesg from kernel 5.8, the sound related parts only show
>>>> as follows but the expected snd_hda_codec_realtek and the snd_soc_skl
>>>> are not even loaded then.
>>>> [ 13.357495] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1f.3: DSP detected with PCI
>>>> class/subclass/prog-if info 0x040100
>>>> [ 13.357500] snd_hda_intel 0000:00:1f.3: Digital mics found on
>>>> Skylake+ platform, using SST driver
>>>>
>>>>       Building the kernel with the CONFIG_SND_SOC_INTEL_KBL removed can
>>>> load the snd_hda_codec_realtek successfully and the pulseaudio and
>>>> alsa-utils can detect the sound cards again. The result of bisecting
>>>> between kernel 5.4 and 5.8 also get similar result, reverting the
>>>> commit "ALSA: hda: Allow SST driver on SKL and KBL platforms with
>>>> DMIC" can fix the issue. I tried to generate the required firmware for
>>>> snd_soc_skl but it did not help. Please refer to what I did in
>>>> https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1915117/comments/14
>>>> and https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1915117/comments/18.
>>>>
>>>>       Since the skl_hda_dsp_generic-tplg.bin and dfw_sst.bin are not in
>>>> the linux-firmware. The Intel SST support for Skylake family is not
>>>> yet complete. Can we simply revert the "ALSA: hda: Allow SST driver on
>>>> SKL and KBL platforms with DMIC" in the current stage and wait for SOF
>>>> support for Skylake family? Or please suggest a better solution for
>>>> this. Thanks
>>>>
>>>> Chris
>>>>
>>>
>>> Hello Chris,
>>>
>>> Guide: "Linux: HDA+DMIC with skylake driver" [1] should help
>>> understanding history behind the problem as well as fixing it.
>>>
>>> Upstream skylake driver - snd_soc_skl - is intended to support HDA DSP +
>>> DMIC configuration via means of snd_soc_skl_hda_dsp machine board
>>> driver. You _may_ switch to legacy HDAudio driver - snd_hda_intel -
>>> losing DMIC support in the process. To remove any confusion - for
>>> Skylake and Kabylake platforms, snd_soc_skl is your option.
>>>
>>> Now, due to above, I doubt any skylake-related topology has ever been
>>> upstreamed to linux-firmware as a) most boards are I2S-based, these are
>>> used by our clients which we support via separate channel b) hda
>>> dsp+dmic support on linux for missing until early 2020.
>>>
>>> Topologies for most common skylake driver configurations:
>>> - skl/kbl with i2s rt286
>>> - apl/glk with i2s rt298
>>> - <any> with hda dsp
>>> can be found in alsa-topology-conf [2].
>>>
>>> Standard, official tool called 'alsatplg' is capable of compiling these
>>> into binary form which, after being transferred to /lib/firmware/ may be
>>> consumed by the driver during runtime.
>>> I have no problem with providing precompiled binaries to linux-firmware,
>>> if that's what community wants.
>>>
>>> Regards,
>>> Czarek
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I think the guild [1] is too complicated for normal users to fix the problem.
>> Given it's not only the internal microphone being affected, it's no sound
>> devices being created at all so no audio functions can work after kernel 5.8.
>>
>> Is there any potential problem to built-in the "<any> with hda dsp" precompiled
>> binary in linux-firmware?
> 
> How do you distribute the SOF firmware? I'm going to include those binary
> topology files to the SOF firmware package for Fedora. Perhaps, you may follow
> this.
> 

Wouldn't it make more sense to distribute binaries along with confs from 
which they are build, which are already installed by alsa-topology package?
Similarly Ubuntu could use alsa-topology-conf package...