17 ms·

Speaker Support in Asahi Linux

275 points by pantalaimon 3y ago

hedora 3y ago
They also added webcam support and an installer for the M2! If the status page is to be believed, it’s getting extremely close to daily driver status for me.
jasoneckert 3y ago
A better title for this would be "Asahi introduces advanced speaker DSP to Linux" as that is the real significance of this new development. I imagine it will be incorporated into other distros soon as a result.
- _joel 3y ago
  Indeed, I didn't think much of the work until it dawned on me the effort needed to accomplish this behind the scenes. Interesting post.
- mahmoudhossam 3y ago
  Can someone ELI5 why advanced speaker DSP is a huge thing? I read the linked document and couldn't really figure out why this is important and why it differs from what we already have in Linux systems.
  - vladvasiliu 3y ago
    The way I understand it, the tiny speakers in laptops don't sound great. But since sound perception is somewhat relative, manufacturers use DSP to try to improve the perception of the sound. Of course, this will never rival an actual "serious" amp and speakers, but it can drastically improve matters. Anecdotally, my HP laptop has a pretty crappy sound under Linux, but under Windows with the Realtek drivers, it sounds OK. The soundcard itself doesn't seem too bad: if I use a pair of nice headphones or plug it into my dedicated stereo, even under Linux I hear no difference compared to using an external DAC connected through USB.
    - globular-toast 3y ago
      But we could already do DSP with Pulseaudio and Pipewire. I guess is making the speakers DSPs "built in" and tweakable with GUI etc? As well as actually creating the speaker DSP profiles, I guess. The speakers safety thing seems like a completely new thing, though. All sounds like an absolute nightmare to anyone even remotely into audio. But I guess tiny speakers are occasionally useful.
      - hotnfresh 3y ago
        In this, our modern world, tiny speakers are what most people listen to most things on, except maybe in their cars. Phones, laptops, tablets. The tiny speakers built into TVs, much smaller than even built-in speakers on CRT TVs used to be. Ear buds of various sorts, and smallish headphones. That’s most audio-listening accounted for (except in cars). Hell, I’ve got a good hi-fi setup and (separately) a probably-top-couple-percent 7.2 home theater audio situation (in one room… but not on the other TV) and even so I listen to things on tiny speakers more than on big ones.
        Wowfunhappy 3y ago
        > In this, our modern world, tiny speakers are what most people listen to most things on, except maybe in their cars. Hmm... I think you're probably right, but the one thing that gives me pause is the enormous market for Bluetooth speakers. I see Bluetooth speakers everywhere! I suppose most Bluetooth speakers are still "small" in the grand scheme of things, but they're certainly larger than phone and laptop speakers. Earbuds are similarly omnipresent. I'm not sure it's accurate to classify those as "tiny speakers"; the physics are different, because they only need to be loud enough to hear when they're next to your ears.
        johnwalkr 3y ago
        Good bluetooth speakers also use similar DSP to sound way better and louder than they would without it so I am not sure this is a counterpoint. The unique thing here is Apple does it on the main CPU, presumably because "why not", so you couldn't safely power the speakers of your mac while running linux until the related features were added.
  - jasoneckert 3y ago
    The main reason DSP is a big thing is because Linux has never focused on it - Google has with Android and ChromeOS, as has Apple and Windows, but Linux speaker audio has always paled in comparison: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 That leaves it up to the laptop vendor to implement hardware to perform DSP (and the quality of this varies tremendously from poor to OK). Apple doesn't use hardware for their speaker DSP (it's all software) and their speakers sound better than anything else out there. Linux now has similar functionality thanks to Asahi, and it will only get better over time.
  - wzdd 3y ago
    I think the idea with the M-series laptops in particular is that you can drive the speakers at volumes that actually damage them very quickly ( see https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53 https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53 ). The idea AIUI is that you can use a DSP along with a physical model of the voice coil to get better sound than you would if the speakers were volume-limited. I don't know how common this arrangement is in other laptops, but it's the kind of hardware/software integration that Apple is known for.
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      It is just dynamic range audio compression to simulate loudness. It is not a new thing.
      - wtallis 3y ago
        It isn't just dynamic range compression. This is actually driving the speakers beyond their safe limits for sustained output as long as the temperature estimate (a function of the specific speaker's characteristics and the recent history of the signal it's been fed) is safe. "Dynamic range compression" doesn't imply any of that.
  - oneplane 3y ago
    It's a huge thing because you can't really fit all the big speakers and audio stuff in tiny laptops and make them sound good. So we use extra steps (the DSP for example) to adjust how the speakers and amplifiers are controlled. Doing it this way allows us to have much better sound from tiny micro speakers. This is important because the alternatives are: - Bad sound and nothing you can do about it - No sound at all - Carry external speakers with you all the time Where in the past it was impossible to both have physically small devices and good sound, technological advances have enabled us to do more with less. So adding that technology means we can now have better sound than in the past.
  - johnwalkr 3y ago
    Manufacturers can do a lot with DSP to make small speakers sound better. But "advanced" is saying a lot here. Recent speakers in macs and macbooks are over-driven to sound better and louder, with the DSP modeling energy input to the speaker and temperature of the speaker and keeping it within its physical limits. Without this DSP, the speakers not only sound terrible but become physically damaged if you try to use them at more than a very low volume. Any modern smart speaker or smartphone you buy will use similar DSP to sound much better and louder than it ought to, given its size. I think other laptops also do something similar at the hardware level. Rightly or wrongly, Apple does it in software on the CPU but until now this wasn't replicated in linux. So the Asahi project (which is for macs with M1/2/3 CPUs), has added this feature to linux[1] and is working on adding DSP models for each model of Mx Mac. In Asahi Linux Speakers have been disabled by default on all models until this feature as well as the specific DSP for each model is ready. Now they have reached the point where speakers are enabled for the first model, which is a huge milestone. [1] I originally wrote "linux kernel" but it is actually done in user space, with interlocks in the kernel to fall back to simple aggressive volume limiting.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      So if the DSP model were only slightly off, then it could permanently damage the speakers?
      - johnwalkr 3y ago
        No because you make the models conservative. In the link marcan mentions they will improve performance over time (presumably partly by making the models less conservative) and are "shipping with a hard volume reduction limit of -7dBFS to catch potential bugs or misbehavior."
        MichaelZuo 3y ago
        If so, how are the speakers over-driven to sound better and louder? Do they have a very very conservative profile by default?
- megous 3y ago
  Or not: https://www.hifiberry.com/docs/software/guide-adding-equalization-using-alsaeq/ https://www.hifiberry.com/docs/software/guide-adding-equaliz...
  - azinman2 3y ago
    This is more than just EQ.
    - megous 3y ago
      So is alsa. You can chain as many steps as you want.
rzzzt 3y ago
> These are all techniques that are in wide use in consumer microspeaker systems in tablets and phones, though sadly not common on laptops from most non-Apple brands. Dell / Realtek / MaxxAudio (not sure who to attribute it to) offers such an implementation with mixed results. Some people go to great lengths to remove it and replace with something that offers a flat response -- personally, I didn't mind the alterations it introduced and the speakers "feel" quieter without it installed.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  For what it's worth, the article says: ----- Our DSP profiles aim to provide a balanced sound, with the features that people expect from high-quality laptop/small-speaker audio. In particular, we aim for: • A balanced (neutral) tone at moderate listening volumes, with a mostly flat frequency response from a typical listening position • Reasonably high peak volume with acceptable sound degradation (compression, limiting, etc.) • "Fake bass" processing to make audible frequencies that cannot be physically reproduced by the speakers, extending the perceived frequency response of the system. • Equal-loudness volume compensation, so that the sound does not become noticeably tinny as the system master volume is lowered. [...] Our goal is explicitly not to clone the full/exact macOS audio experience. We consider the macOS speaker DSP processing to be too tryhard. ----- So I suspect Asahi's implementation will be far more conservative than the systems you're referencing. It's also worth noting Marcan is a musician.
  - rzzzt 3y ago
    These are very similar things to the features the MaxxAudio control panel offered (and now that I think of it, my ancient Windows 8 tablet had Dolby-badged software on it with a similar feature set): - Custom response curves for the built-in speaker as well as some brand speakers/headphones (responsible for the "what did you just plug in?" dialog that annoys many users) - User-adjustable EQ - Compression, limiter, AVL, "night mode", loudness: I'm lumping these together in one basket as I don't know what components were in use behind the scenes - Reverb: for cases where you want to listen to music that comes out of a PVC drain pipe of a concert hall's restroom - Possibly downmixing multi-channel audio for headphone users, but I'm not sure in this one either.
almostnormal 3y ago
Linux had speaker [0] support since longer than I can remember. Reading the headline I was expecting something about software using it to create less low quality output. But it seems it is about modifying the "modern" audio output to work around limitations of laptop speakers. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker
- n2d4 3y ago
  This is specifically about Asahi Linux, a distro that runs on Apple Silicon (which had no speaker support so far) You're right that if you're missing that context, it's kind of hard to tell just from this issue alone.
rowanG077 3y ago
They really go the extra mile, and then another mile on top of it. I guess the only "main" feature remaining essentially all other laptops have is external screen support.
- hedora 3y ago
  Also, touch id and neural network inferencing acceleration. Presumably, you’d get AI acceleration, but not reasonable battery life on a gaming NVIDIA laptop. Anyway, once speaker support arrives for the M2’s I’ll try switching back to Linux for my daily driver (almost all my dev work happens in an ARM VM under MacOS as it is…)
  - rowanG077 3y ago
    There is a driver for the Neural engine. Touch id doesn't work yet.
    - MBCook 3y ago
      Does Touch ID work on the Intel Macs?
      - aPoCoMiLogin 3y ago
        it does
AshamedCaptain 3y ago
This article is a bit bombastic and light on details: "modern audio laptop subsystem", "advanced DSP", "the first desktop Linux platform with integrated advanced speaker DSP", "driving Linux desktop audio forward a couple decades".... while as far as I can tell there are exactly 0 new things described. > These [DSP profiles] are all techniques that are in wide use in consumer microspeaker systems in tablets and phones, though sadly not common on laptops from most non-Apple brands. As anyone who has bought a laptop less than 10 years old can attest, practically _all_ laptops ship with "DSP effects for tiny speakers", to varying results. Microsoft has even standarized an API in Windows 10/11 so that you literally can shop for different implementors in the Windows store (e.g. Sonic, B&O, etc.). > EasyEffects Article itself mentions previous work on DSP effects... > we also have the world's first (as far as we know) open source "smart amp" implementation. Old Nokia devices shipped with xprot which is about a decade old. Speaker protection, DSP, noise cancelling, etc. back when pulseaudio was just renamed from polypaudio. https://blog.linuxplumbersconf.org/2009/slides/Jyri-Sarha-audio_miniconf_slides.pdf https://blog.linuxplumbersconf.org/2009/slides/Jyri-Sarha-au...
- TimTheTinker 3y ago
  All of this may be old hat for macOS and Windows, but it's entirely new to Linux. That's kind of the point.
  - AshamedCaptain 3y ago
    EasyEffects is designed for Linux. xprot is designed for Linux. Both open-source. And used in consumer products. (And all of this is ignoring the bunch of Android stuff which while Linux doesn't classify as "desktop Linux").
    - TimTheTinker 3y ago
      I mean a vendor-specific DSP/speakersafetyd/hardware chain being exposed as the onboard speaker device for certain laptops, instead of the raw device. This has never existed as an OOTB experience. In Apple's case, it's absolutely necessary to avoid blowing up the speakers - hence why they disabled speaker output before the audio chain was done.
Wowfunhappy 3y ago
A demonstration of how important the speaker DSP is: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867
- kuschku 3y ago
  Tbh? While I can tell a difference, I couldn't tell you which one is supposed to sound "better".
  - shmerl 3y ago
    You can hear the difference very well using regular headphones. The supposedly "better" one feels strongly amplified.
    - Aeolos 3y ago
      It's not just loudness, the DSP version also has a much more natural flat/neutral sound profile. If you are interested, there are corresponding frequency response measurements from a measurement microphone in a sibling thread.
    - bscphil 3y ago
      I agreed with this so I made the levels equal (as measured objectively with EBU R 128): https://0x0.st/HvXA.wav https://0x0.st/HvXA.wav The first (DSP processed) clip still sounds much better to me. The first time the unprocessed clip is played it's rather noisy for some reason, that could be room noise picked up in the microphone though. The high end is missing from the second clip almost entirely (anything above 5 khz). However the DSP clip isn't without significant problems. It sounds distorted to my ear, and slightly pitch shifted as well. It's rather "tinny" sounding. I'd rate both clips extremely annoying to listen to in comparison to the original which seems pretty well mastered if you like this sort of thing: https://youtu.be/ZRtdQ81jPUQ?t=52 https://youtu.be/ZRtdQ81jPUQ?t=52 It's hard to tell how much of this is due to it being a quick and dirty recording. Also, being able to play audio at higher volumes is supposed to be one of the big advantages of using this DSP chain, since temperature spikes created by transients are managed in software. (Just speaking for myself personally, I've never felt that my non-Apple laptop speakers needed to be louder, even without DSP.)
sampa 3y ago
everything about asahi feels like it's an apple's product: everywhere you look - it is always "amazing"! but so far no finally usable implementation exists even for m1 macbooks and they age quickly, and I doubt people will see anything usable in the end (yeah, you might get a fully working Linux on your old dusty m1 when you buy m7, happy?). so far it is achievements for the sake of achievements
- alin23 3y ago
  Things take significantly more time without documentation. Try reverse engineering something and you’ll wake up 7 days later with almost no result thinking what the heck were you trying to do in the first place. so far it is achievements for the sake of achievements We are people, and we need to feel that our hard work isn’t for nothing. Sharing achievements and getting some praise for it is one way to keep our ambition. Asahi devs are reading these comments. Don’t shit on their work for no good reason.
- viraptor 3y ago
  So far M systems are pretty similar to each other, which means m2 was much less work than m1. And I suspect m3 will be less work than m2. There's definitely a long delay on the first model, but extrapolating that to 6 next releases doesn't make sense. > so far it is achievements for the sake of achievements People are daily driving Asahi today, so that's incorrect.
- seszett 3y ago
  > but so far no finally usable implementation exists even for m1 macbooks and they age quickly, and I doubt people will see anything usable in the end (yeah, you might get a fully working Linux on your old dusty m1 when you buy m7, happy?). I'm not sure what you mean, I've been running Asahi on my M1 for about a year now. I have enabled sound (without the safeties, but I'm not listening to anything remotely loud) and the only thing annoying is the lack of microphone (I have to plug headphones when I need a micro). It's been totally usable for at least a year.
2Gkashmiri 3y ago
i want to buy a used apple m1 machine just to use asahi. (coming from a linux guy who has never owned an apple mac machine) i have seen all the "tables showing compatibility" but how is it in real life? i should i buy a machine solely to daily drive asahi?
- Aeolos 3y ago
  I've been using Asahi on the M1 Air for >1 year now for my personal / non-work laptop, and it works decently. With sound & webcam support now enabled, this can now now be used fine as a daily driver. Battery life during use is excellent, up there with the best of any linux laptop, and GPU acceleration is good and getting better every day. Missing features, so you can decide if those matter to you: - improved external monitor support - hardware video decoding - mainly for better battery life, because the CPU is more than fast enough for real-time software decoding. (This is work-in-progress.) - fingerprint sensor
  - toomim 3y ago
    And sleep.
- rowanG077 3y ago
  As someone who daily drives a Linux M2 MBP: It depends if you can live with some caveats. The main ones are - No sound from the speakers (unless you have an M1 as can be seen from this post). But headphones work. - No external screen support - No Thunderbolt - No Fingerprint sensor - No Video decoding/encoding acceleration. But the CPU is strong enough to easily keep up with 4k 60FPS. So you "just" pay for it with shorter battery life. - No support for some important GPU APIs (Vulkan, OpenCL, newer openGL) which some application you use might need. The above list is the current state and even a few months from now will probably look different.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    What about the microphone? IMO that's a really big one, something you just expect all laptops to have in 2023. I suppose if you're using headphones anyway (since the M2 doesn't have speaker support) they may come with a microphone, but they may not...
jchw 3y ago
Huh, is it really true this is the first? I figured this was just being done in hardware in some modern laptops instead of software. At least for basic stuff like EQ, if not compressor/etc. Otherwise, what's with all of the DSP stuff modern Intel laptops need on Linux, what with Sound Open Firmware and whatnot? (And if not that, I am mildly surprised ChromeOS/Chromebooks don't do much of this either.)
- p_l 3y ago
  TL;DR various variants of the same technique are covered by different patents, and Apple doing this on application processor avoids some of those patents. A good example of different approach is laptops branded with "Harman Kardon" speakers - Harman-Kardon has a patent on exactly this but involving separate DSP running transparently to the OS. Similarly there are various other solutions to improve sound quality of small speakers being done, and for some of that modern SoCs are bringing in dedicated DSPs onboard.
  - jchw 3y ago
    Interesting. So, on top of, I presume, whatever DSP you get from the sound chipset/SoC, there could be other layers of DSP throughout the hardware too. That seems like a real pain in the ass, to be honest. (Though personally I'd really prefer something that protects the voice coils from overheating to be in hardware at least, if nothing else.) (I still do genuinely wonder what's going on inside of SOF on modern Intel laptops, too. That's not separate from the chipset and I don't think it gets tuned for specific laptop acoustics. So what does that do?)
    - p_l 3y ago
      Having recently looked for new laptop, they often have firmware loaded by driver on windows into DSP or sound chain, sometimes even to enable half of the speakers you need to custom load firmware on Linux which apparently includes DSP code that adapts stereo signal for multiple speakers with different parameters.
    - nudgeee 3y ago
wolf550e 3y ago
@marcan wrote a lot about the DSP work and why it's important / what it does. He also wrote about bugs across the linux audio stack. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111379933565349212 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111379933565349212 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111369113203280839 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111369113203280839 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111368139961624028 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111368139961624028 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111363323102625920 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111363323102625920 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111356347520217702 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111356347520217702 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111351807108120657 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111351807108120657 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111322854564301468 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111322854564301468 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111312763506327704 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111312763506327704 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111305404286878529 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111305404286878529 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111275789631652315 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111275789631652315 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111274712520670628 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111274712520670628 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111274302586522319 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111274302586522319 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230007884019185 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230007884019185
- wolf550e 3y ago
  New post "So how does speakersafetyd work?" https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111398084943456556 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111398084943456556
esjeon 3y ago
For DSP, we already can do that using something like Easy Effects[1][2]. Unfortunately, this isn't shippable for distros. The biggest issue is acquiring proper impulse-response data. In theory, it has to be tuned per-model, and turning basically requires pro-grade equipment and a recording studio. However, apparently many people assume Dolby is using the same profile for all laptops, so just copy-paste the same file here and there. Not really sure which is the real case. Anyways, Asahi can ship DSP turned on by default because the distro is specific to Apple. That's how Apple boosts the quality of its hardware, and the same applies to a distro dedicated to it. [1]: https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27122564/which-version-of-linux-has-support-for-dolby-advanced-audio-v2 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27122564/which-version-o...
- hedora 3y ago
  Honestly, this sort of thing should be considered “shippable”, and the fact that it isn’t has been holding Linux back for 10+ years. I’ve been waiting decades for a Linux distro that just buys a few commonly produced laptops that are likely to be produced for a few years, and then tests the crap out of them and applies this sort of polish. Current gen thinkpads probably would have fit the bill for the last ~30 years, for example. I was hoping the pinebook pro would be this, but it has a few severe hardware issues (suspend battery life, DSP noise) that don’t look like they’ll be fixed. Similarly, the XPS line has the capacitor whine problem, and are based on Intel (which has been exclusively shipping power hungry hot messes for the last 10 years). If the M[1-3] end up being the models where Linux finally gains stable support for reasonable laptop hardware, then so be it.
  - biorach 3y ago
    > I’ve been waiting decades for a Linux distro that just buys a few commonly produced laptops that are likely to be produced for a few years, and then tests the crap out of them and applies this sort of polish. I suspect that the laptop market is far too fragmented to make this worthwhile
    - 3y ago
karmakaze 3y ago
This seems to be a problem being solved at too low a level of abstraction. It should be able to use the same architecture for performing say a 7.1 to binaural headphone 2-channel output, all by only routing and processing signals. Perhaps this is how it's being solved, but having "speaker" so hardcoded in the project work may not be the case, or seemingly so.
- wtallis 3y ago
  Part of what this is trying to solve requires working with zero abstraction over the underlying hardware: driving the laptop's built-in speakers as hard as possible without literally melting them, which requires not just processing the audio data in realtime, but also accounting for the particular characteristics of each laptop model's several speakers.
  - karmakaze 3y ago
    All that info can be made available at a higher level. The only reason to do it at a lower one is to reduce surface area where software bugs could destroy the speakers. > Our implementation, speakersafetyd, monitors feedback signals from the amplifiers, estimates speaker voice coil temperature using a two-stage thermal model, and reduces the hardware speaker volumes when the speakers get too warm. We also have kernel-side interlocks to disable or limit speaker volumes if speakersafetyd is not running or non-responsive. This is the only part that seems to need to be low-level, anything else could be done at a higher one, generally EQ type settings like 'loudness'.
    - hedora 3y ago
      Existing laptops provide that higher level of abstraction, and audio quality is uniformly garbage. It’s likely much easier for the open source people to do the work to deal with the underlying physics once, and then port it to all hardware. The laptop models are all essentially the same (they have a few electromagnets, cones and a few sounding boards). Each one has different parameters in their mostly-linear response curves. My guess is that after the first few models work well all the others will rapidly fall into line. Something similar happened with printers 20 years ago. The open source stack implemented state of the art dithering and font hinting once and ended up producing higher quality output than the commercial windows drivers for the same printers.
jancsika 3y ago
> This allows the speakers to be driven to much higher peak levels than the worst-case safe volume level, greatly extending their dynamic range. So software devs are going to drive the speakers past the worst-case safe volume level that was presumably set by hardware engineers? And they are going to do it with software running in a OS that isn't realtime safe? Anyone else see a problem here? Also-- does anyone know what Asahi is using to test the safety of what they're doing?
- Zetobal 3y ago
  You never overclocked a CPU when you were a youngling? For example I undervolt my CPU and GPU for lower noise and heat with just 2-3% loss in performance.
- mort96 3y ago
  What is your proposed alternative solution, given the constraint that without exceeding the guaranteed-safe volume levels, the speakers are garbage?
- kalleboo 3y ago
  That's how it works on macOS already, that's how these machines are designed to run.
- CuriousCosmic 3y ago
  > Anyone else see a problem here? No. The worst case safe volume levels are levels determined by the speaker manufactures that if you never exceed, you can never harm the hardware (due to overheating, etc). You can and should exceed those levels to use the hardware as it is intended by the manufacturers however if are doing so, you are now moving from a static system (one set of safe levels) to a dynamic system where the safe levels are determined by a multitude of variables and as such you need to have software or hardware monitoring those variables to keep the system within those safe bounds.
- jakobson14 3y ago
  Another person who doesn't understand a damn thing about why the safety daemon is needed or how it works. If you keep careful track of the audio going through the speakers and the energy in each frequency range, you can figure out exactly what the temperature is at any given moment and make sure it stays under the limit. However, this requires a ton of math. Alternatively, you can just put a hard cap on the volume, such that no combination of frequencies could ever overheat the speakers. This is safe, but sounds like crap. It's a far, far less nuanced way to do things and results in restricting how hard you can drive the speakers far more than is actually nesisary.
dfc 3y ago
Sound on Linux is the one thing that seems to be more confusing 25 years later. I can remember scouring Usenet/mailing lists trying to research which soundblaster card to get for the best experience. When I compare that to wrapping my head around Pipewire+Pulseaudio+Jackd+*effects I feel like I know way less about sound on Linux now. I don't do any professional audio stuff I just want to listen to music on my Linux computers and occasionally play the sound throughout the house. Whenever I start to look into doing it "the right way" it is always overwhelming.
- mdhen 3y ago
  Pipewire and its compatbility programs is all you need. So arch that is pipewire, pipewire-alsa and pipewire-pulse. There's also pipewire-jack if you need jack support.
  - coldtea 3y ago
    Ah, the "just switch to this distro" fix.
    - bmicraft 3y ago
      That was just an example, almost every other distro will also have handled that for you. No need to do anything.
- morsch 3y ago
  I also know less about sound on Linux now. I don't even know if my system is running Pulseaudio or Pipewire. I don't need to know! I consider this an improvement.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I hadn't heard of uclamp before, mentioned as a way to save power on the compute intensive DSP work. Found this tweet by Marcan that seems to indicate it's a way to pin the process to e-cores. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111363323102625920 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111363323102625920
agentbellnorm 3y ago
The Asahi devs are doing the lords work. Looking forward to using it in the future.
WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
For the sake of completeness, this problem is not at all endemic to Apple’s M hardware. Some of the older Thinkpads — W510, T400, and T410, so beloved and praised by Linux enthusiasts, used to suffer from the same problem — their speakers could get destroyed after a few minutes of playing audio. Just wondering if Lenovo’s drivers for Windows 7 included similar safeguards.
devit 3y ago
Seems really terrible engineering to design a laptop where malware can destroy the speakers. I guess there's reason to wonder whether malware might also be able to set the whole machine on fire.
- jareklupinski 3y ago
  > malware might also be able to set the whole machine on fire that was one of my favorite parts of Mr. Robot
- coldtea 3y ago
  >Seems really terrible engineering to design a laptop where malware can destroy the speakers It's not something laptop specific: you can damage any pair of plain regular speakers (say hi-fi speakers) by sending them the right (meaning wrong) audio signals to them: burn the voice coil, fry the tweaters, etc. Audio engineers take certain precautions to what they send the speakers. Laptop speakers have software control of the speakers for protecting them from this, and to allow better performance as long as the components aren't overheating, etc.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  MacOS has SIP which makes it impossible for malware to alter these system components.
  - nicce 3y ago
    Then there us powerusers which disable SIP for better window control… But also, there have been many bugs in the past which bypassed SIP.
- londons_explore 3y ago
  All modern hardware can be destroyed by something that gets sufficient permissions to poke hardware registers. You could for example blow all the efuses in anything with signed firmware versioning - meaning there would be no firmware release that will boot anymore. You can also typically increase system voltages to cause failure, erase flash so many times it fails in a few minutes, overwrite bootloaders in peripherals so they can't be fixed without a soldering iron, etc.
Topgamer7 3y ago
My Asus g14 sounds awful on speakers. Hopefully this can fix that :)

275 points by pantalaimon 3y ago

They also added webcam support and an installer for the M2! If the status page is to be believed, it’s getting extremely close to daily driver status for me.

jasoneckert 3y ago

A better title for this would be "Asahi introduces advanced speaker DSP to Linux" as that is the real significance of this new development. I imagine it will be incorporated into other distros soon as a result.

_joel 3y ago
Indeed, I didn't think much of the work until it dawned on me the effort needed to accomplish this behind the scenes. Interesting post.
mahmoudhossam 3y ago
Can someone ELI5 why advanced speaker DSP is a huge thing? I read the linked document and couldn't really figure out why this is important and why it differs from what we already have in Linux systems.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  The way I understand it, the tiny speakers in laptops don't sound great. But since sound perception is somewhat relative, manufacturers use DSP to try to improve the perception of the sound. Of course, this will never rival an actual "serious" amp and speakers, but it can drastically improve matters. Anecdotally, my HP laptop has a pretty crappy sound under Linux, but under Windows with the Realtek drivers, it sounds OK. The soundcard itself doesn't seem too bad: if I use a pair of nice headphones or plug it into my dedicated stereo, even under Linux I hear no difference compared to using an external DAC connected through USB.
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    But we could already do DSP with Pulseaudio and Pipewire. I guess is making the speakers DSPs "built in" and tweakable with GUI etc? As well as actually creating the speaker DSP profiles, I guess. The speakers safety thing seems like a completely new thing, though. All sounds like an absolute nightmare to anyone even remotely into audio. But I guess tiny speakers are occasionally useful.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      In this, our modern world, tiny speakers are what most people listen to most things on, except maybe in their cars. Phones, laptops, tablets. The tiny speakers built into TVs, much smaller than even built-in speakers on CRT TVs used to be. Ear buds of various sorts, and smallish headphones. That’s most audio-listening accounted for (except in cars). Hell, I’ve got a good hi-fi setup and (separately) a probably-top-couple-percent 7.2 home theater audio situation (in one room… but not on the other TV) and even so I listen to things on tiny speakers more than on big ones.
      - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
        > In this, our modern world, tiny speakers are what most people listen to most things on, except maybe in their cars. Hmm... I think you're probably right, but the one thing that gives me pause is the enormous market for Bluetooth speakers. I see Bluetooth speakers everywhere! I suppose most Bluetooth speakers are still "small" in the grand scheme of things, but they're certainly larger than phone and laptop speakers. Earbuds are similarly omnipresent. I'm not sure it's accurate to classify those as "tiny speakers"; the physics are different, because they only need to be loud enough to hear when they're next to your ears.
        johnwalkr 3y ago
        Good bluetooth speakers also use similar DSP to sound way better and louder than they would without it so I am not sure this is a counterpoint. The unique thing here is Apple does it on the main CPU, presumably because "why not", so you couldn't safely power the speakers of your mac while running linux until the related features were added.
- jasoneckert 3y ago
  The main reason DSP is a big thing is because Linux has never focused on it - Google has with Android and ChromeOS, as has Apple and Windows, but Linux speaker audio has always paled in comparison: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 That leaves it up to the laptop vendor to implement hardware to perform DSP (and the quality of this varies tremendously from poor to OK). Apple doesn't use hardware for their speaker DSP (it's all software) and their speakers sound better than anything else out there. Linux now has similar functionality thanks to Asahi, and it will only get better over time.
- wzdd 3y ago
  I think the idea with the M-series laptops in particular is that you can drive the speakers at volumes that actually damage them very quickly ( see https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53 https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53 ). The idea AIUI is that you can use a DSP along with a physical model of the voice coil to get better sound than you would if the speakers were volume-limited. I don't know how common this arrangement is in other laptops, but it's the kind of hardware/software integration that Apple is known for.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    It is just dynamic range audio compression to simulate loudness. It is not a new thing.
    - wtallis 3y ago
      It isn't just dynamic range compression. This is actually driving the speakers beyond their safe limits for sustained output as long as the temperature estimate (a function of the specific speaker's characteristics and the recent history of the signal it's been fed) is safe. "Dynamic range compression" doesn't imply any of that.
- oneplane 3y ago
  It's a huge thing because you can't really fit all the big speakers and audio stuff in tiny laptops and make them sound good. So we use extra steps (the DSP for example) to adjust how the speakers and amplifiers are controlled. Doing it this way allows us to have much better sound from tiny micro speakers. This is important because the alternatives are: - Bad sound and nothing you can do about it - No sound at all - Carry external speakers with you all the time Where in the past it was impossible to both have physically small devices and good sound, technological advances have enabled us to do more with less. So adding that technology means we can now have better sound than in the past.
- johnwalkr 3y ago
  Manufacturers can do a lot with DSP to make small speakers sound better. But "advanced" is saying a lot here. Recent speakers in macs and macbooks are over-driven to sound better and louder, with the DSP modeling energy input to the speaker and temperature of the speaker and keeping it within its physical limits. Without this DSP, the speakers not only sound terrible but become physically damaged if you try to use them at more than a very low volume. Any modern smart speaker or smartphone you buy will use similar DSP to sound much better and louder than it ought to, given its size. I think other laptops also do something similar at the hardware level. Rightly or wrongly, Apple does it in software on the CPU but until now this wasn't replicated in linux. So the Asahi project (which is for macs with M1/2/3 CPUs), has added this feature to linux[1] and is working on adding DSP models for each model of Mx Mac. In Asahi Linux Speakers have been disabled by default on all models until this feature as well as the specific DSP for each model is ready. Now they have reached the point where speakers are enabled for the first model, which is a huge milestone. [1] I originally wrote "linux kernel" but it is actually done in user space, with interlocks in the kernel to fall back to simple aggressive volume limiting.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    So if the DSP model were only slightly off, then it could permanently damage the speakers?
    - johnwalkr 3y ago
      No because you make the models conservative. In the link marcan mentions they will improve performance over time (presumably partly by making the models less conservative) and are "shipping with a hard volume reduction limit of -7dBFS to catch potential bugs or misbehavior."
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        If so, how are the speakers over-driven to sound better and louder? Do they have a very very conservative profile by default?
megous 3y ago
Or not: https://www.hifiberry.com/docs/software/guide-adding-equalization-using-alsaeq/ https://www.hifiberry.com/docs/software/guide-adding-equaliz...
- azinman2 3y ago
  This is more than just EQ.
  - megous 3y ago
    So is alsa. You can chain as many steps as you want.

rzzzt 3y ago

> These are all techniques that are in wide use in consumer microspeaker systems in tablets and phones, though sadly not common on laptops from most non-Apple brands. Dell / Realtek / MaxxAudio (not sure who to attribute it to) offers such an implementation with mixed results. Some people go to great lengths to remove it and replace with something that offers a flat response -- personally, I didn't mind the alterations it introduced and the speakers "feel" quieter without it installed.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
For what it's worth, the article says: ----- Our DSP profiles aim to provide a balanced sound, with the features that people expect from high-quality laptop/small-speaker audio. In particular, we aim for: • A balanced (neutral) tone at moderate listening volumes, with a mostly flat frequency response from a typical listening position • Reasonably high peak volume with acceptable sound degradation (compression, limiting, etc.) • "Fake bass" processing to make audible frequencies that cannot be physically reproduced by the speakers, extending the perceived frequency response of the system. • Equal-loudness volume compensation, so that the sound does not become noticeably tinny as the system master volume is lowered. [...] Our goal is explicitly not to clone the full/exact macOS audio experience. We consider the macOS speaker DSP processing to be too tryhard. ----- So I suspect Asahi's implementation will be far more conservative than the systems you're referencing. It's also worth noting Marcan is a musician.
- rzzzt 3y ago
  These are very similar things to the features the MaxxAudio control panel offered (and now that I think of it, my ancient Windows 8 tablet had Dolby-badged software on it with a similar feature set): - Custom response curves for the built-in speaker as well as some brand speakers/headphones (responsible for the "what did you just plug in?" dialog that annoys many users) - User-adjustable EQ - Compression, limiter, AVL, "night mode", loudness: I'm lumping these together in one basket as I don't know what components were in use behind the scenes - Reverb: for cases where you want to listen to music that comes out of a PVC drain pipe of a concert hall's restroom - Possibly downmixing multi-channel audio for headphone users, but I'm not sure in this one either.

almostnormal 3y ago

Linux had speaker [0] support since longer than I can remember. Reading the headline I was expecting something about software using it to create less low quality output. But it seems it is about modifying the "modern" audio output to work around limitations of laptop speakers. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker

n2d4 3y ago
This is specifically about Asahi Linux, a distro that runs on Apple Silicon (which had no speaker support so far) You're right that if you're missing that context, it's kind of hard to tell just from this issue alone.

rowanG077 3y ago

They really go the extra mile, and then another mile on top of it. I guess the only "main" feature remaining essentially all other laptops have is external screen support.

hedora 3y ago
Also, touch id and neural network inferencing acceleration. Presumably, you’d get AI acceleration, but not reasonable battery life on a gaming NVIDIA laptop. Anyway, once speaker support arrives for the M2’s I’ll try switching back to Linux for my daily driver (almost all my dev work happens in an ARM VM under MacOS as it is…)
- rowanG077 3y ago
  There is a driver for the Neural engine. Touch id doesn't work yet.
  - MBCook 3y ago
    Does Touch ID work on the Intel Macs?
    - aPoCoMiLogin 3y ago
      it does

AshamedCaptain 3y ago

This article is a bit bombastic and light on details: "modern audio laptop subsystem", "advanced DSP", "the first desktop Linux platform with integrated advanced speaker DSP", "driving Linux desktop audio forward a couple decades".... while as far as I can tell there are exactly 0 new things described. > These [DSP profiles] are all techniques that are in wide use in consumer microspeaker systems in tablets and phones, though sadly not common on laptops from most non-Apple brands. As anyone who has bought a laptop less than 10 years old can attest, practically _all_ laptops ship with "DSP effects for tiny speakers", to varying results. Microsoft has even standarized an API in Windows 10/11 so that you literally can shop for different implementors in the Windows store (e.g. Sonic, B&O, etc.). > EasyEffects Article itself mentions previous work on DSP effects... > we also have the world's first (as far as we know) open source "smart amp" implementation. Old Nokia devices shipped with xprot which is about a decade old. Speaker protection, DSP, noise cancelling, etc. back when pulseaudio was just renamed from polypaudio. https://blog.linuxplumbersconf.org/2009/slides/Jyri-Sarha-audio_miniconf_slides.pdf https://blog.linuxplumbersconf.org/2009/slides/Jyri-Sarha-au...

TimTheTinker 3y ago
All of this may be old hat for macOS and Windows, but it's entirely new to Linux. That's kind of the point.
- AshamedCaptain 3y ago
  EasyEffects is designed for Linux. xprot is designed for Linux. Both open-source. And used in consumer products. (And all of this is ignoring the bunch of Android stuff which while Linux doesn't classify as "desktop Linux").
  - TimTheTinker 3y ago
    I mean a vendor-specific DSP/speakersafetyd/hardware chain being exposed as the onboard speaker device for certain laptops, instead of the raw device. This has never existed as an OOTB experience. In Apple's case, it's absolutely necessary to avoid blowing up the speakers - hence why they disabled speaker output before the audio chain was done.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago

A demonstration of how important the speaker DSP is: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867

kuschku 3y ago
Tbh? While I can tell a difference, I couldn't tell you which one is supposed to sound "better".
- shmerl 3y ago
  You can hear the difference very well using regular headphones. The supposedly "better" one feels strongly amplified.
  - Aeolos 3y ago
    It's not just loudness, the DSP version also has a much more natural flat/neutral sound profile. If you are interested, there are corresponding frequency response measurements from a measurement microphone in a sibling thread.
  - bscphil 3y ago
    I agreed with this so I made the levels equal (as measured objectively with EBU R 128): https://0x0.st/HvXA.wav https://0x0.st/HvXA.wav The first (DSP processed) clip still sounds much better to me. The first time the unprocessed clip is played it's rather noisy for some reason, that could be room noise picked up in the microphone though. The high end is missing from the second clip almost entirely (anything above 5 khz). However the DSP clip isn't without significant problems. It sounds distorted to my ear, and slightly pitch shifted as well. It's rather "tinny" sounding. I'd rate both clips extremely annoying to listen to in comparison to the original which seems pretty well mastered if you like this sort of thing: https://youtu.be/ZRtdQ81jPUQ?t=52 https://youtu.be/ZRtdQ81jPUQ?t=52 It's hard to tell how much of this is due to it being a quick and dirty recording. Also, being able to play audio at higher volumes is supposed to be one of the big advantages of using this DSP chain, since temperature spikes created by transients are managed in software. (Just speaking for myself personally, I've never felt that my non-Apple laptop speakers needed to be louder, even without DSP.)

sampa 3y ago

everything about asahi feels like it's an apple's product: everywhere you look - it is always "amazing"! but so far no finally usable implementation exists even for m1 macbooks and they age quickly, and I doubt people will see anything usable in the end (yeah, you might get a fully working Linux on your old dusty m1 when you buy m7, happy?). so far it is achievements for the sake of achievements

alin23 3y ago
Things take significantly more time without documentation. Try reverse engineering something and you’ll wake up 7 days later with almost no result thinking what the heck were you trying to do in the first place. so far it is achievements for the sake of achievements We are people, and we need to feel that our hard work isn’t for nothing. Sharing achievements and getting some praise for it is one way to keep our ambition. Asahi devs are reading these comments. Don’t shit on their work for no good reason.
viraptor 3y ago
So far M systems are pretty similar to each other, which means m2 was much less work than m1. And I suspect m3 will be less work than m2. There's definitely a long delay on the first model, but extrapolating that to 6 next releases doesn't make sense. > so far it is achievements for the sake of achievements People are daily driving Asahi today, so that's incorrect.
seszett 3y ago
> but so far no finally usable implementation exists even for m1 macbooks and they age quickly, and I doubt people will see anything usable in the end (yeah, you might get a fully working Linux on your old dusty m1 when you buy m7, happy?). I'm not sure what you mean, I've been running Asahi on my M1 for about a year now. I have enabled sound (without the safeties, but I'm not listening to anything remotely loud) and the only thing annoying is the lack of microphone (I have to plug headphones when I need a micro). It's been totally usable for at least a year.

2Gkashmiri 3y ago

i want to buy a used apple m1 machine just to use asahi. (coming from a linux guy who has never owned an apple mac machine) i have seen all the "tables showing compatibility" but how is it in real life? i should i buy a machine solely to daily drive asahi?

Aeolos 3y ago
I've been using Asahi on the M1 Air for >1 year now for my personal / non-work laptop, and it works decently. With sound & webcam support now enabled, this can now now be used fine as a daily driver. Battery life during use is excellent, up there with the best of any linux laptop, and GPU acceleration is good and getting better every day. Missing features, so you can decide if those matter to you: - improved external monitor support - hardware video decoding - mainly for better battery life, because the CPU is more than fast enough for real-time software decoding. (This is work-in-progress.) - fingerprint sensor
- toomim 3y ago
  And sleep.
rowanG077 3y ago
As someone who daily drives a Linux M2 MBP: It depends if you can live with some caveats. The main ones are - No sound from the speakers (unless you have an M1 as can be seen from this post). But headphones work. - No external screen support - No Thunderbolt - No Fingerprint sensor - No Video decoding/encoding acceleration. But the CPU is strong enough to easily keep up with 4k 60FPS. So you "just" pay for it with shorter battery life. - No support for some important GPU APIs (Vulkan, OpenCL, newer openGL) which some application you use might need. The above list is the current state and even a few months from now will probably look different.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  What about the microphone? IMO that's a really big one, something you just expect all laptops to have in 2023. I suppose if you're using headphones anyway (since the M2 doesn't have speaker support) they may come with a microphone, but they may not...

jchw 3y ago

Huh, is it really true this is the first? I figured this was just being done in hardware in some modern laptops instead of software. At least for basic stuff like EQ, if not compressor/etc. Otherwise, what's with all of the DSP stuff modern Intel laptops need on Linux, what with Sound Open Firmware and whatnot? (And if not that, I am mildly surprised ChromeOS/Chromebooks don't do much of this either.)

p_l 3y ago
TL;DR various variants of the same technique are covered by different patents, and Apple doing this on application processor avoids some of those patents. A good example of different approach is laptops branded with "Harman Kardon" speakers - Harman-Kardon has a patent on exactly this but involving separate DSP running transparently to the OS. Similarly there are various other solutions to improve sound quality of small speakers being done, and for some of that modern SoCs are bringing in dedicated DSPs onboard.
- jchw 3y ago
  Interesting. So, on top of, I presume, whatever DSP you get from the sound chipset/SoC, there could be other layers of DSP throughout the hardware too. That seems like a real pain in the ass, to be honest. (Though personally I'd really prefer something that protects the voice coils from overheating to be in hardware at least, if nothing else.) (I still do genuinely wonder what's going on inside of SOF on modern Intel laptops, too. That's not separate from the chipset and I don't think it gets tuned for specific laptop acoustics. So what does that do?)
  - p_l 3y ago
    Having recently looked for new laptop, they often have firmware loaded by driver on windows into DSP or sound chain, sometimes even to enable half of the speakers you need to custom load firmware on Linux which apparently includes DSP code that adapts stereo signal for multiple speakers with different parameters.
  - nudgeee 3y ago

wolf550e 3y ago

@marcan wrote a lot about the DSP work and why it's important / what it does. He also wrote about bugs across the linux audio stack. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111379933565349212 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111379933565349212 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111369113203280839 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111369113203280839 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111368139961624028 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111368139961624028 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111363323102625920 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111363323102625920 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111356347520217702 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111356347520217702 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111351807108120657 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111351807108120657 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111322854564301468 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111322854564301468 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111312763506327704 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111312763506327704 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111305404286878529 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111305404286878529 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111275789631652315 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111275789631652315 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111274712520670628 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111274712520670628 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111274302586522319 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111274302586522319 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230007884019185 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230007884019185

wolf550e 3y ago
New post "So how does speakersafetyd work?" https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111398084943456556 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111398084943456556

esjeon 3y ago

For DSP, we already can do that using something like Easy Effects[1][2]. Unfortunately, this isn't shippable for distros. The biggest issue is acquiring proper impulse-response data. In theory, it has to be tuned per-model, and turning basically requires pro-grade equipment and a recording studio. However, apparently many people assume Dolby is using the same profile for all laptops, so just copy-paste the same file here and there. Not really sure which is the real case. Anyways, Asahi can ship DSP turned on by default because the distro is specific to Apple. That's how Apple boosts the quality of its hardware, and the same applies to a distro dedicated to it. [1]: https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects https://github.com/wwmm/easyeffects [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27122564/which-version-of-linux-has-support-for-dolby-advanced-audio-v2 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27122564/which-version-o...

hedora 3y ago
Honestly, this sort of thing should be considered “shippable”, and the fact that it isn’t has been holding Linux back for 10+ years. I’ve been waiting decades for a Linux distro that just buys a few commonly produced laptops that are likely to be produced for a few years, and then tests the crap out of them and applies this sort of polish. Current gen thinkpads probably would have fit the bill for the last ~30 years, for example. I was hoping the pinebook pro would be this, but it has a few severe hardware issues (suspend battery life, DSP noise) that don’t look like they’ll be fixed. Similarly, the XPS line has the capacitor whine problem, and are based on Intel (which has been exclusively shipping power hungry hot messes for the last 10 years). If the M[1-3] end up being the models where Linux finally gains stable support for reasonable laptop hardware, then so be it.
- biorach 3y ago
  > I’ve been waiting decades for a Linux distro that just buys a few commonly produced laptops that are likely to be produced for a few years, and then tests the crap out of them and applies this sort of polish. I suspect that the laptop market is far too fragmented to make this worthwhile
  - 3y ago

karmakaze 3y ago

This seems to be a problem being solved at too low a level of abstraction. It should be able to use the same architecture for performing say a 7.1 to binaural headphone 2-channel output, all by only routing and processing signals. Perhaps this is how it's being solved, but having "speaker" so hardcoded in the project work may not be the case, or seemingly so.

wtallis 3y ago
Part of what this is trying to solve requires working with zero abstraction over the underlying hardware: driving the laptop's built-in speakers as hard as possible without literally melting them, which requires not just processing the audio data in realtime, but also accounting for the particular characteristics of each laptop model's several speakers.
- karmakaze 3y ago
  All that info can be made available at a higher level. The only reason to do it at a lower one is to reduce surface area where software bugs could destroy the speakers. > Our implementation, speakersafetyd, monitors feedback signals from the amplifiers, estimates speaker voice coil temperature using a two-stage thermal model, and reduces the hardware speaker volumes when the speakers get too warm. We also have kernel-side interlocks to disable or limit speaker volumes if speakersafetyd is not running or non-responsive. This is the only part that seems to need to be low-level, anything else could be done at a higher one, generally EQ type settings like 'loudness'.
  - hedora 3y ago
    Existing laptops provide that higher level of abstraction, and audio quality is uniformly garbage. It’s likely much easier for the open source people to do the work to deal with the underlying physics once, and then port it to all hardware. The laptop models are all essentially the same (they have a few electromagnets, cones and a few sounding boards). Each one has different parameters in their mostly-linear response curves. My guess is that after the first few models work well all the others will rapidly fall into line. Something similar happened with printers 20 years ago. The open source stack implemented state of the art dithering and font hinting once and ended up producing higher quality output than the commercial windows drivers for the same printers.

jancsika 3y ago

> This allows the speakers to be driven to much higher peak levels than the worst-case safe volume level, greatly extending their dynamic range. So software devs are going to drive the speakers past the worst-case safe volume level that was presumably set by hardware engineers? And they are going to do it with software running in a OS that isn't realtime safe? Anyone else see a problem here? Also-- does anyone know what Asahi is using to test the safety of what they're doing?

Zetobal 3y ago
You never overclocked a CPU when you were a youngling? For example I undervolt my CPU and GPU for lower noise and heat with just 2-3% loss in performance.
mort96 3y ago
What is your proposed alternative solution, given the constraint that without exceeding the guaranteed-safe volume levels, the speakers are garbage?
kalleboo 3y ago
That's how it works on macOS already, that's how these machines are designed to run.
CuriousCosmic 3y ago
> Anyone else see a problem here? No. The worst case safe volume levels are levels determined by the speaker manufactures that if you never exceed, you can never harm the hardware (due to overheating, etc). You can and should exceed those levels to use the hardware as it is intended by the manufacturers however if are doing so, you are now moving from a static system (one set of safe levels) to a dynamic system where the safe levels are determined by a multitude of variables and as such you need to have software or hardware monitoring those variables to keep the system within those safe bounds.
jakobson14 3y ago
Another person who doesn't understand a damn thing about why the safety daemon is needed or how it works. If you keep careful track of the audio going through the speakers and the energy in each frequency range, you can figure out exactly what the temperature is at any given moment and make sure it stays under the limit. However, this requires a ton of math. Alternatively, you can just put a hard cap on the volume, such that no combination of frequencies could ever overheat the speakers. This is safe, but sounds like crap. It's a far, far less nuanced way to do things and results in restricting how hard you can drive the speakers far more than is actually nesisary.

dfc 3y ago

Sound on Linux is the one thing that seems to be more confusing 25 years later. I can remember scouring Usenet/mailing lists trying to research which soundblaster card to get for the best experience. When I compare that to wrapping my head around Pipewire+Pulseaudio+Jackd+*effects I feel like I know way less about sound on Linux now. I don't do any professional audio stuff I just want to listen to music on my Linux computers and occasionally play the sound throughout the house. Whenever I start to look into doing it "the right way" it is always overwhelming.

mdhen 3y ago
Pipewire and its compatbility programs is all you need. So arch that is pipewire, pipewire-alsa and pipewire-pulse. There's also pipewire-jack if you need jack support.
- coldtea 3y ago
  Ah, the "just switch to this distro" fix.
  - bmicraft 3y ago
    That was just an example, almost every other distro will also have handled that for you. No need to do anything.
morsch 3y ago
I also know less about sound on Linux now. I don't even know if my system is running Pulseaudio or Pipewire. I don't need to know! I consider this an improvement.

jauntywundrkind 3y ago

I hadn't heard of uclamp before, mentioned as a way to save power on the compute intensive DSP work. Found this tweet by Marcan that seems to indicate it's a way to pin the process to e-cores. https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111363323102625920 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111363323102625920

agentbellnorm 3y ago

The Asahi devs are doing the lords work. Looking forward to using it in the future.

WesolyKubeczek 3y ago

For the sake of completeness, this problem is not at all endemic to Apple’s M hardware. Some of the older Thinkpads — W510, T400, and T410, so beloved and praised by Linux enthusiasts, used to suffer from the same problem — their speakers could get destroyed after a few minutes of playing audio. Just wondering if Lenovo’s drivers for Windows 7 included similar safeguards.

devit 3y ago

Seems really terrible engineering to design a laptop where malware can destroy the speakers. I guess there's reason to wonder whether malware might also be able to set the whole machine on fire.

jareklupinski 3y ago
> malware might also be able to set the whole machine on fire that was one of my favorite parts of Mr. Robot
coldtea 3y ago
>Seems really terrible engineering to design a laptop where malware can destroy the speakers It's not something laptop specific: you can damage any pair of plain regular speakers (say hi-fi speakers) by sending them the right (meaning wrong) audio signals to them: burn the voice coil, fry the tweaters, etc. Audio engineers take certain precautions to what they send the speakers. Laptop speakers have software control of the speakers for protecting them from this, and to allow better performance as long as the components aren't overheating, etc.
Gigachad 3y ago
MacOS has SIP which makes it impossible for malware to alter these system components.
- nicce 3y ago
  Then there us powerusers which disable SIP for better window control… But also, there have been many bugs in the past which bypassed SIP.
londons_explore 3y ago
All modern hardware can be destroyed by something that gets sufficient permissions to poke hardware registers. You could for example blow all the efuses in anything with signed firmware versioning - meaning there would be no firmware release that will boot anymore. You can also typically increase system voltages to cause failure, erase flash so many times it fails in a few minutes, overwrite bootloaders in peripherals so they can't be fixed without a soldering iron, etc.

Topgamer7 3y ago

My Asus g14 sounds awful on speakers. Hopefully this can fix that :)