Sys-audio does not see hardware sound devices

User Support Hardware Issues
1

I’ve reinstalled my system and I’m adding an audio qube.

My problem is that the audio qube (sys-audio) does not see hardware output devices.

In pavucontrol I see only a dummy output.
I can see a bunch of qubes in the Playback tab and it seems like the other VMs are woking.

My sys-audio qube is based on a fedora-41-xfce template with qubes-audio-daemon qubes-core-admin-client installed.
I’ve changed the qubes-prefs to use sys-audio as the default audio vm.
I’ve added a custom service to sys-audio called audiovm.

I am not sure where sys-audio get its access to the hardware from.
Does anyone know where to start looking?

2

Don’t you need to forward the hardware to that AppVM to use it? It could be a PCI or USB hardware device to move.

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3

My audio is built-in and doesn’t show up in the devices menu (except for the microphone).
I’ve previously used this laptop with qubes & a audio vm and it did not need to be attached in the usual device way.

4

Check if an audio device is forwarded to this sys-audio VM.

The audio device can be a PCI or USB sound card, or for example a bluetooth module and configured bluetooth headphones.

dom0: just run qvm-pci and qvm-usb. In both cases, you will see a list of available devices with a short description and an annotation of which VM the device is currently assigned to. Pay special attention to the PCI device named “Audio device”.

You can only pass a device to PCI when the VM is turned off.
Example for PCI device:

# Run on dom0
# Find Audio device
qvm-pci | grep Audio
# Turn off HVM sys-audio
qvm-pci attach sys-audio --persistent dom0:00_1f.3 -o no-strict-reset=True
# where dom0:00_1f.3 is your BACKEND:DEVID

For USB device is similar:

# Run on dom0
# Find Audio device
qvm-usb
qvm-usb attach --persistent sys-audio sys-usb:1-10
# Where sys-usb:1-10 is your BACKEND:DEVID

As for permanently passing to USB - two comments from me:

  1. Make sure that this device is always in the same USB slot. A different slot = a different number in the system, and it is passed by the slot number/ID.
  2. sys-audio after passing a USB device permanently may not start automatically after restarting the system (even though the “Start qube automatically on boot” option will be active). This is due to the order in which the machines are started, it can be bypassed with a script. More information is in:
    Unable to get sys-audio qube to auto start on boot - #22 by apparatus
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