[Sound-open-firmware] SOF firmware and topology files

[Pierre-Louis Bossart]

> I while back I was on the email list asking questions about backporting kernel fixes to Debian and getting the ucm files into Debian - and all of that has now been done. Many thanks for the pointers and the help. We almost have the Lenovo X1Carbon-7 audio working "out of the box" with Debian but there are still a few wrinkles and I'd appreciate any insight as to the best way to address these - and more importantly what I can do to help that happen :)
> 
> 1) I currently add a blacklist file to stop the snd_hda_intel and snd_soc_skl drivers being loaded. I think based on some discussion and patches I saw in the alsa-devel thread you may have solved that issue - is that correct or is it still work in progress?

There is a first solution that should deal with the selection of SOF. I 
tested it but there are reports of additional issues on KabyLake w/ 
DRM-i915 stuff, so need to recheck if we did something wrong for SKL/KBL.

> 2) I've been using the sof-cnl-signed-intel.ri from the 1.3 release (and it's working great). Is there a plan how this will be handled downstream? For instance for Debian I didn't know whether it would become part of the intel-firmware package, or if maybe sof becomes its own package would be built by itself and the firmware grabbed from there, or does it go with some other alsa package?
> As an aside I tried the second approach (building it myself) but the resultant sof-cnl.ri fails to load succesfully. I haven't debugged it yet but are there any particular pointers on whether this should usually work or ideas why it wouldn't.

Yes, you cannot build your own firmware for a platform that uses the 
Intel production key, the firmware will not be authenticated for that 
platform and you will see a trace in the dmesg log.

We were planning to provide the binaries to the Linux firmware tree but 
it's taken a bit of a delay with travel/vacation/priorities. There is 
also a possible mismatch with firmware names that needs to be sorted out.

> 3) I've also got a sof-hda-generic.tplg file the origins of which I'm a bit unsure (I think I swiped it from Ubuntu as they have an image that works well on the X1C7). I tried building my own version but get ipc errors (I can share if of interest). Similarly to the sof-cnl.ri file - is there a plan/recommendations as to how this should make its way downstream?

Our goal was to provide topology files and UCM files concurrently in a 
single repository that can be taken by downstream distros. I know Jaska 
is working on the UCM parts. Jaska please chime in, thanks!