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Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux

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  Re: [External]  Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux Vincent Bernat <bernat@debian.org> - 2020-06-03 22:00 +0200
    Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux Mark Pearson <markpearson@lenovo.com> - 2020-06-03 22:20 +0200
    Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux Paul Wise <pabs@debian.org> - 2020-06-04 02:50 +0200
      Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux Vincent Bernat <bernat@debian.org> - 2020-06-04 09:00 +0200

#11879 — Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux

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 ❦  3 juin 2020 13:39 +00, Mark Pearson:

> As an important example - the X1 Carbon 7 (which is a popular machine)
> still doesn't work well with any version of Debian (including
> experimental or testing) as the audio is broken. Debian users have to
> jump through a few hoops to get it to work. I've let the maintainer
> know a number of times what is involved to fix that but it's obviously
> not a priority (as a heads up - Debian on most Lenovo 2020 platforms
> is going to suck because of this too). I'm not meaning to point
> fingers - but just explain why it feels as if Debian and the latest
> hardware is an awkward fit.

I have the mentioned X1 Carbon. Currently, in unstable, we have the
kernel and Alsa. We need to pull PulseAudio from experimental and add a
patch. I was hoping PulseAudio upstream would release 13.99.2 for Debian
to pick. I can work on getting the patch in Debian in the meantime.

Then, we need the SOF firmwares, currently not in Debian. I see
you have #960788. I just got aware of it through #962134. I am happy to
help you on this package and get it uploaded.

Despite having everything, the sound still lacks bass (notably compared
to Windows). People are trying various tweaks to get better results, but
then headphones don't work anymore. Dunno if this is something you can
pull some levers on. There are some information here:

https://gist.github.com/hamidzr/dd81e429dc86f4327ded7a2030e7d7d9#gistcomment-3175225
-- 
Replace repetitive expressions by calls to a common function.
            - The Elements of Programming Style (Kernighan & Plauger)

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#11880 — Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux

Hi Vincent

On 6/3/2020 3:29 PM, Vincent Bernat wrote:
>   ❦  3 juin 2020 13:39 +00, Mark Pearson:
> 
>> As an important example - the X1 Carbon 7 (which is a popular machine)
>> still doesn't work well with any version of Debian (including
>> experimental or testing) as the audio is broken. Debian users have to
>> jump through a few hoops to get it to work. I've let the maintainer
>> know a number of times what is involved to fix that but it's obviously
>> not a priority (as a heads up - Debian on most Lenovo 2020 platforms
>> is going to suck because of this too). I'm not meaning to point
>> fingers - but just explain why it feels as if Debian and the latest
>> hardware is an awkward fit.
> 
> I have the mentioned X1 Carbon. Currently, in unstable, we have the
> kernel and Alsa. We need to pull PulseAudio from experimental and add a
> patch. I was hoping PulseAudio upstream would release 13.99.2 for Debian
> to pick. I can work on getting the patch in Debian in the meantime.
> 
That would be amazing. Thank you! Do let me know if I can help in 
anyway. I'm a very long way from being an audio expert but I got a 
decent amount of exposure to the SOF side of things over the last few months

> Then, we need the SOF firmwares, currently not in Debian. I see
> you have #960788. I just got aware of it through #962134. I am happy to
> help you on this package and get it uploaded.
Brilliant.

> 
> Despite having everything, the sound still lacks bass (notably compared
> to Windows). People are trying various tweaks to get better results, but
> then headphones don't work anymore. Dunno if this is something you can
> pull some levers on. There are some information here:
> 
> https://gist.github.com/hamidzr/dd81e429dc86f4327ded7a2030e7d7d9#gistcomment-3175225
> 
Interesting thread - I'd not seen that one before (and I've seen a fair 
few threads on the audio issues)

We did a bunch of work with Jaroslav Kysela @ RH to tune the audio - we 
got the audio schematics for him etc. I'm not sure I can share them 
publicly though - still the hard bit with open source and HW design - 
sometimes NDA's are still needed.

As an aside I wanted some education into what was involved with the 
tuning so my team could do it for future platforms but wasn't able to 
get that (it's not just Debian devs who are too busy :)).

Anyway - I'll definitely dig thru the thread and see what I can do. If 
you have ideas on what specific information is needed to get it solved 
let me know and I can try and dig it up - I have access to the HW team 
for any information and whilst it sometimes takes a bit of time to get 
details (they're in Japan and China and it often takes a bit of back and 
forth to clarify) they're usually pretty good at helping out.

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#11884 — Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux

On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 7:51 PM Vincent Bernat wrote:

> Then, we need the SOF firmwares, currently not in Debian. I see
> you have #960788. I just got aware of it through #962134. I am happy to
> help you on this package and get it uploaded.

Unfortunately SOF firmware, while it has freely licensed source code,
is not (very) useful to package properly (reproducibly built from
source etc) for Debian. The issue is that many devices require the
firmware binaries to have an Intel signature on them, so even though
we have freely licensed source code, we do not have the four freedoms
since we cannot upload our own firmware binaries onto the audio
devices. So the best option here is for Intel to do the building and
signing and get them included in linux-firmware and then Debian pull
the latest version of that.

More details in the links on this page:

https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware/Open

Mark, do you know if Lenovo devices require Intel signatures on the
audio firmware?

-- 
bye,
pabs

https://wiki.debian.org/PaulWise

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#11886 — Re: [External] Re: ThinkPad laptops preinstalled Linux

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 ❦  4 juin 2020 00:35 +00, Paul Wise:

>> Then, we need the SOF firmwares, currently not in Debian. I see
>> you have #960788. I just got aware of it through #962134. I am happy to
>> help you on this package and get it uploaded.
>
> Unfortunately SOF firmware, while it has freely licensed source code,
> is not (very) useful to package properly (reproducibly built from
> source etc) for Debian. The issue is that many devices require the
> firmware binaries to have an Intel signature on them, so even though
> we have freely licensed source code, we do not have the four freedoms
> since we cannot upload our own firmware binaries onto the audio
> devices. So the best option here is for Intel to do the building and
> signing and get them included in linux-firmware and then Debian pull
> the latest version of that.

Unfortunately, updating firmware-nonfree is difficult:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=949019
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=962134

Also, related to Lenovo, a more recent version of iwlwifi is also needed
to get a stable wifi.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=942563

I have also updated the firmwares for the GPU in hope of getting a
better stability during the 5.3/5.4 era.

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=931930
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=956221
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=956658

With the dock and a recent kernel, I also need a firmware for the
Realtek NIC chipset (I didn't bother to open an issue).

Ben just doesn't have time to do updates. However, checking the git
repository, I see there may be a release in progress. So we could
squeeze the SOF firmwares here.

https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/firmware-nonfree/-/commits/master
-- 
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would
be a merrier world.
		-- J.R.R. Tolkien

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