NUC 11 Performance - No audio on any Ubuntu-based OS?

[retroNUC]

Hi all, purchased a few NUC 11 Performance kits recently that I was planning on dual-booting Windows 10 and Ubuntu with. While the Windows 10 setup is working fine, I've spent countless days trying to find any version of Ubuntu that'll get working HDMI audio with the NUC11, but no luck.

Tried Ubuntu 20.04 (kernel 5.8) and the new 21.04 release (kernel 5.10). Also tried manually upgrading kernels on some of these to latest (5.12 just came out), but I'm still having trouble getting any audio devices to work. Either it just comes up as 'Dummy Output' as the only audio card, or it lists the HDMI Audio device correctly but still doesn't output any audio.

Has anyone got Tiger Lake / SoundWire based systems working on Linux? Any advice you can give? Thanks.

[Hans_Bausewein]

@retroNUC 

Try the Linux hardware database to find the required kernel version.

Then find a distribution that matches the version.

For PCI devices (like on-board audio) check

sudo lspci -v

and use the hexadecimal device id to refine your search.

For recent hardware you may have to do some patch work unless someone else already has done that.

dmesg may give some hints:

sudo dmesg --human

Btw, I do not have an 11th gen NUC.

Hans

[retroNUC]

Thanks Hans. Sorry for not replying to this earlier, as I just gave up and switched to Windows 10. After much research, the issue seems to be a kernel configuration bug that affects all SoundWire-based audio system on Intel chipsets. Most complaints I've seen are for 2020 Dell/Lenovo laptops using Tiger Lake chips, but I guess it affects the NUC 11 series as well.

I haven't tested this myself, but it should work. Here's the current state of this bug across several distros:

Debian

• Reported and fixed on unstable - https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=976791
• Would need to run unstable branch with kernel 5.10.4-1 or later, or testing branch and manually compile the kernel source yourself

Ubuntu

• Reported, unfixed - https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1912673 
  Instructions here to recompile kernel with missing config flag, but ran into loads of pitfalls trying to do this myself - https://www.reddit.com/r/Dell/comments/n27cbr/audio_on_ubuntu_2104_on_dell_latitude_9510/

Not sure about state on Arch, as I was looking to run software that required apt package manager. If someone from Intel could poke Canonical about the bug linked above, given it's affecting a lot of new hardware, I'm sure it would be handled with a higher priority!

[Hans_Bausewein]

The config is enabled in linux-image-5.10.0-0.bpo.5-amd64 from Debian Backports .

From my NUC10:

hans@nuc:~$ grep CONFIG_SOUNDWIRE /boot/config-5.10.0-0.bpo.5-amd64
CONFIG_SOUNDWIRE=m
CONFIG_SOUNDWIRE_CADENCE=m
CONFIG_SOUNDWIRE_INTEL=m
CONFIG_SOUNDWIRE_QCOM=m
CONFIG_SOUNDWIRE_GENERIC_ALLOCATION=m

For Ubuntu check UbuntuBackports if the main-line package is too old.

Hans

[David_G_Intel]

Hello @retroNUC

Thank you for posting on the Intel️® communities. 

This is a known Issue with Linux, please contact their support for more information. You can also test the steps provided here:

• Intel® Iris® Xe MAX Graphics with Linux*
  • https://dgpu-docs.intel.com/devices/iris-xe-max-graphics/index.html

Please keep in mind that this thread will no longer be monitored by Intel. Thank you for your understanding.  

Regards, 

David G 

Intel Customer Support Technician