Wednesday, December 21, 2016

A Holiday Gift From Conexant: an ALSA Driver For Recent Cherry Trail SOC Based Devices

Late on Monday Simon Ho of Conexant announced the release of a driver for the company's driver for CX2072X codec to the ALSA-devel mailing list. I have to add a tip of the proverbial hat to Pierre Bossart who shared the information in kernel.bugzilla.org where I found it. According to Mr. Bossart we can expect “a follow-up machine driver soon from Intel.” The machines where sound has been a problem have Intel SST sound on the SOC which uses the Conexant codec. On those systems the "sound card" is simply not detected.

This is good news for owners of many recent tablets and notebooks running on recent Intel Atom (Cherry Trail) based SOCs. These include systems by Acer, ASUS, HP, Toshiba and probably others. It impacts Android as well as more conventional Linux distributions. Preliminary testing in the user community, though limited at this point, appears to be entirely positive.

NOTE: I'll be posting a full review of my HP x2 Detachable 10-p010nr, the latest incarnation of that company's 10” 2-in-1 device shortly. Please watch this space.