[BUG] No HDMI surround output on Intel Lunar Lake-M HD Audio

[Erick555]

Describe the bug
On Dell Pro Plus laptop with integrated Intel Lunar Lake-M HD soundcard there are no HDMI surround outputs or profiles. There are only HDMI stereo outputs/profiles for speakers, headphones, headset, etc.

After setting options snd-intel-dspcfg dsp_driver=1 to force legacy intel HDA driver the HDMI surround profiles appear but they are shown as unplugged with no available output device. I was able to output 6 channel sound when forcing the output with speaker-test -c 6 -D hw:0,3 -r 48000 -p 100000 -t wav but that's all.

Moreover, in legacy mode internal speakers device/profile disappears so it's not possible to use them at all.

I found 3 year old issue where it was said it's known limitation that won't be fixed on old intel platforms but it still happen on brand new intel platform as shown above. Moreover, the suggested workaround of forcing Intel HDAudio doesn't exactly work for the issue and it creates other problems.

My setup works out of the box on older device with Intel HDAudio soundcard.

To Reproduce
speaker-test -c 6

Reproduction Rate
all the time.

Expected behavior
A clear and concise description of what you expected to happen.

Impact
showstopper

Environment

1. Branch name and commit hash of the 2 repositories: sof (firmware/topology) and linux (kernel driver).
   • Kernel: 6.17.9
   • SOF: v2025.05.1
2. Name of the topology file
   • Topology: intel/sof-ipc4-tplg/sof-lnl-cs42l43-l0.tplg
3. Name of the platform(s) on which the bug is observed.
   • Platform: Linux, Lunar Lake, Dell Pro Plus

Screenshots or console output (EDIT: (uploaded new also-info logs for clarity)

sof_hdmi-plugged_ucp-on_alsa-info.txt

sof-hdmi-plugged_ucp-off_alsa-info.txt

legacy-intel-hda_hdmi-plugged_ucp-on_alsa-info.txt

legacy-intel-hda_hdmi-plugged_ucp-off_alsa-info.txt

[lgirdwood]

@ujfalusi @jsarha is the use case we need the 5.1 HDMI receiver to be inserted 1st in order to read the EID channel data and mark this configuration as supported by the PCM device ?

[Erick555]

After investigating this further I found that disabling ALSA Use Case Manager in wireplumber config makes HDMI surround profiles to appear while using sof kernel driver. The are also correctly detected as active (plugged) when HDMI cable is attached (that doesn't work for HDA driver). With following snippet HDMI surround playback works out of the box on my device:

~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/99-disable-alsa-ucp.conf

monitor.alsa.properties = {
  alsa.use-ucm = false
}

Hover this disables internal speakers (card is shown is inactive with and without HDMI cable attached, there are no available profiles other than HDMI. This is similar effect to using Intel HDA driver.

Disabling ucm while using Intel HDA driver has no effect - HDMI outputs ares still shown as unplugged (cable attached) and internal speakers are gone.

Updates alsa-info logs in first post.

[Erick555]

It seems there was attempt to fix it in alsa-ucm but it didn't get merged: alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf#633

I also found related threads

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/4755

#5461

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/4928

[bneils]

Intel Lunar Lake-M

Kernel: 6.17.9

Revert to kernel 6.17.7, this is a regression in 6.17.8 for devices using the Lunar Lake sound card.

[Erick555]

Do you mean surround profiles will appear in 6.17.7 with sof driver? Is 6.18.1 affected by regression?

[ujfalusi]

@bneils, what kind of regression happened in 6.17.8?

[ujfalusi]

@Erick555, if you use the audio card directly with:

speaker-test -c 6 -D hw:0,5 -r 48000 -p 100000 -t wav

Then it should work (given the device connected has support for 6 channel).

Your laptop is using soundwire for analog audio, it is not supported by the legacy stack, this is why you loose everything but HDMI by switching to it.

To add to the list of related issues: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/pipewire/pipewire/-/issues/4976

While the multichannel (and passthrough) audio works in ALSA level for LNL it is masked for users by how UCM designed to expose audio use cases and how these use cases are parsed by pipewire and pulseaudio and finally how this is presented by user interfaces (KDE/GNOME/etc).

While alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf#633 can provide the surround profiles it will - in my opinion - creates a mess in UI level which makes navigating between profiles far from intuitive to say the least.

We are trying to figure out with upper stack guys on how to make this right but the progress slowed down recently I guess because of other priorities for them.

[Erick555]

Yeah, I found those discussions myself. From user POV convoluted UI is still better than nothing and as I see, surround profiles are broken for all intel generations released in past several years. I think perfect may be the enemy of the good here.

The UI issue may not be even related directly to surround profiles but to the fact the Headphones, Headset, Mic combinations are attached to every profile. I think surround profiles could be added first since it's known how to do that then UI can be tweaked later when some consensus is achieved. If it requires coordination between alsa-ucm, pipewire and DE then it may take another several years to get the result into most linux distros.

[ujfalusi]

@Erick555, while the UCM patch gives the profiles for the surround, on my setup the UI's channel mapping got completely off:
#5461 (comment)
The speakers are shuffled a bit while from command line (which I use for firmware and kernel testing) all channels are in correct position.
I don't know the PW code that well to guess where the chmap goes corrupt. I'll file a new issue for this and see if it can be addressed and we can push for the UCM variants to be applied so at least you can have a way to select surround, but a proper way still need to be found for UCM/PW/UIs.

[Erick555]

You are right, the mapping is messed up with the ucm patch. The only workaround remains disabling ucm which disables internal speakers.

[ujfalusi]

@Erick555, thank you for confirming :(

can you check this:

monitor.alsa.rules = [
  {
    # Matches all SOF alsa sinks
    matches = [
      {
        api.alsa.card.name = "~sof-.*"
        node.name = "~alsa_output.*"
      }
    ]
    actions = {
      update-props = {
        api.alsa.use-chmap = false
      }
    }
  }
]

inside of ~/.config/wireplumber/wireplumber.conf.d/50-sof-config.conf and reboot with the surround variant UCM patch and see if the channels are still all over the place?

[Erick555]

Withe the above config and ucm patch from alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf#633 channel mapping is still messed up unfortunately