No audio cards found in dom0 within Qubes OS 4.1rc4 (Intel Tiger Lake)

User Support General
1

My computer is a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i, with a Tiger Lake Intel CPU (i7-1165G7), and all pavucontrol shows is “Dummy Output”, despite the device being listed in lspci output

[user@dom0 ~]$ lspci -nnk | grep -A2 Audio
00:1f.3 Multimedia audio controller [0401]: Intel Corporation Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Technology Audio Controller [8086:a0c8] (rev 20)
	Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:3809]
	Kernel driver in use: sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl

I tried updating to the latest kernel available, to no avail:

[user@dom0 ~]$ uname -a
Linux dom0 5.14.10-1.fc32.qubes.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Oct 10 00:25:34 CEST 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Does anyone have any pointers as to what could I do to fix this?

2

try plugin your headphones to see if they work with some music.

3

Plugging on headphones doesn’t do anything sadly, as PulseAudio still only reports a “Dummy Output” device
pavucontrol

4

what version is your OS?

5

It’s a (somewhat) fresh install of Qubes OS 4.1-rc4 (I say somewhat since I modified some aesthetic settings and enabled testing repos)

6

some aesthetic settings might effect your audio channel.

7

also, rev20 is different from rev21, that might be the card problem

8

This computer that I might saw the settings about this might not be compatible to 4.1rc4

9

also, rev20 is different from rev21, that might be the card problem

I don’t think I understand what does this mean, sadly

This computer that I might saw the settings about this might not be compatible to 4.1rc4

I haven’t seen much about this computer related to Qubes but I saw in the HCL that other computers with the same chipset work (or at least, don’t have any remark indicating sound doesn’t work)

10

you might use it without any sound at all. GL HF

11

Well, that’s not really a solution for me because I need audio to attend videoconferences and such :sweat_smile:
But thank you for your input anyways, it is appreciated

12

use second computer as your work computer and your current computer use as a something different from the second computer

13

I managed to fix it! :smile:
I checked the output of sudo dmesg and it pointed to missing firmware files, and had a link to this repository (thesofproject/sof-bin), and after following the manual instructions in the README (I couldn’t get the install script to work for some reason) and a reboot, pavucontrol shows the audio devices.

1 Like
14

I do recognize that downloading binaries from a repository isn’t probably the best idea considering they’re being used on Dom0, but I must admit I was in a bit of a rush :sweat_smile:, and the possibility of building the firmware itself is (most likely) there since the source code is available

15

congrats

16

For more security you could try to set up an audio VM (new feature of Qubes 4.1): Setting up an audio VM. Not sure if it’s still experimental, so be careful. More info: Qubes Architecture Next Steps: The GUI Domain | Qubes OS.

1 Like
17

Hi Sergal,

I have same issue… i5 11th gen CPU… Qubes does not see my sound card at all!!
At the moment I’m downloading older versions, but if not can you can you please walk me through step by step with the “thesofproject/sof-bin” work around.

I would like to use Qubes OS as my daily driver, but with no sound it would be a bit quiet for me.

Hope to hear from you.

Thanks Corne