Soundcard issues with i3wm (but not other WMs)

[danderzei]

I am unable to use the on-board sound card. Sound is fine when hooking up to docking station.

All works fine when I boot the installation USB.

In pavucontrol the Alder Lake controller is set to ‘Off’ and the Output Device is ‘Dummy Output’.

Interestingly, when I switch the audio to “Pro Audio” all video playback stops until I switch it to off again.

It used to work mostly fine until yesterday.

Hardware log: https://0x0.st/XwD3.txt

Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Alder Lake Imaging Signal Processor vendor: Dell
    driver: intel-ipu6 bus-ID: 00:05.0 chip-ID: 8086:465d
  Device-2: Intel Alder Lake Smart Sound Audio vendor: Dell
    driver: sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl bus-ID: 00:1f.3 chip-ID: 8086:51cc
  API: ALSA v: k6.10.8-arch1-1 status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.2.3 status: active with: 1: pipewire-pulse
    status: active 2: wireplumber status: active 3: pipewire-alsa type: plugin
    4: pw-jack type: plugin

[ddnn]

Your thread title says, “but not other WMs”. Which others have you tried?

Also, if it was working just fine before, it’s very likely caused by an update. Have you recently done any kernel or pipewire/wireplumber updates?

cat /var/log/pacman.log

[danderzei]

I booted the installation USB and that worked fine. So I decided to do a fresh install (is much easier than troubleshooting in my experience). My home directory is on another partition so it is a very quick way to fix issues.

However, with the fresh install of i3 the I cannot use onboard sound card. Headphones or external speakers are fine.

[BluishHumility]

@danderzei

Kernel: 6.10.8-arch1-1

There is a regression affecting 6.10.8 which may be causing your issue. See this related Arch forum thread: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=299158

Also see this related GitLab issue:

[6.10.8] No audio after upgrading kernel from 6.10.7 to 6.10.8 (#76) · Issues...

A patch was already pushed to revert the bad commit (https://lore.kernel.org/alsa-devel/0780217b-1b92-4c22-bb5a-5b290c66dfe9@linux.intel.com/T/#t), so I suppose it’s just a matter of waiting for the update to come down in the repos. In the meantime, downgrading the kernel to 6.10.7 should resolve the issue.

[danderzei]

Cool, that makes sense. Pardon my ignorance, but how do I downgrade a kernel? Is it as simple as sudo downgrade linux and select the previous version?

[BluishHumility]

Yes, typically it is that easy. Kernel modules can be a complicating factor, for example if you have proprietary drivers that are tied to a specific kernel version you may need to reinstall or downgrade those as well.

Also, if you compile kernel modules (like out-of-tree drivers, for example DKMS packages) you’ll need the matching kernel headers for the downgraded kernel. In that case you can downgrade them together, like this:

sudo downgrade linux linux-headers

[danderzei]

Thanks, that works.