Microphone issues with sys-audio as AudioVM

User Support General
, ,
1

I’m running Qubes OS r4.2 on a Thinkpad x240.
When using dom0 as my AudioVM I can attach my microphone to a vm and it will work perfectly fine.

I want to use bluetooth earbuds when I’m away from home, after a bit of research I landed on this guide, I followed it pretty much exactly except for using debian-12-minimal as the TemplateVM, and I also added in the following policies to resolve error messages when switching the microphone between AppVMs:

admin.vm.device.mic.Available       *                            sys-audio    sys-audio              allow target=dom0
admin.vm.device.mic.Available       *                            sys-audio    @adminvm               allow target=dom0
admin.vm.device.mic.Available       *                            sys-audio    @tag:audiovm-sys-audio allow target=dom0
admin.vm.device.usb.Available       *                            sys-audio    sys-usb                allow target=dom0

Sound output works perfectly, and I can record (terrible quality) microphone audio inside sys-audio using arecord --format S32_LE --device="plughw:CARD=PCH,DEV=0", parecord on the other hand wouldn’t work.

My sound card output in lspci -nn:
00:1b.0 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation 8 Series HD Audio Controller [8086:9c20] (rev 04)

Based on the state of everything I can only guess that the issue is a missing package or misconfigured pipewire inside sys-audio because the microphone is working at the alsa layer but not on the pipewire layer.

Sorry if this post has mistakes in it, it was written right before bed so I’m a bit tired.

Thanks in advance, Basil

1 Like
2

Run lspci -k to see which driver is in use but I doubt it’s a driver issue with integrated audio…

3

This is the lspci -k output for the sound card inside dom0

00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series HD Audio Controller (rev 04)
	Subsystem: Lenovo ThinkPad X240
	Kernel driver in use: pciback
	Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel

And this is the output inside sys-audio

00:06.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 8 Series HD Audio Controller (rev 04)
	Subsystem: Lenovo ThinkPad X240
	Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
	Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
4

I’m assuming you have pipewire-qubes installed? I am not sure how to troubleshoot this. Looks like the driver is loaded, but maybe try installing the linux-firmware package.

It’s also unclear what exactly your issue is.

5

The issue I’m experiencing is that when the laptop’s sound card is attached to sys-audio it makes the integrated microphone not work when i try to interface with it via pipewire in any way, So I can’t pass it to the AppVM that my browser is in to speak in a conference.

Also no, I did not have pipewire-qubes installed, I just tried installing it though and it didn’t appear to affect the issue at all. I have the firmware packages for my sound card too.

6

There isn’t any official documentation for creating an audioVM so I’m not even sure if you need pipewire-qubes; that is normally what you need to install for audio but perhaps creating an audioVM removes that need.