Arch Linux

Cederien

Member

Registered: 2024-10-09

Posts: 1

No audio passthrough to PulseAudio from W11 guest.

I've been using Windows10 VM's for years now, but given that Win10 is nearing EOL I tried to get a win11 VM up and running. After some minor quibbles it works pretty well, except ... no audio passthrough.

I'm passing the audio from the windows guest to the host using PulseAudio. Basically using the settings for PCI passthrough via OVMF from the ArchWiki page, so:

<sound model='ich9'>
  <codec type='micro'/>
  <audio id='1'/>
  <audio id='1' type='pulseaudio' serverName='/run/user/1000/pulse/native'/>
</sound>

Which is then automatically translated by VM Manager to:

<sound model="ich9">
  <codec type="micro"/>
  <audio id="1"/>
  <address type="pci" domain="0x0000" bus="0x00" slot="0x1b" function="0x0"/>
</sound>

This works perfectly fine for any Win10 guest, but fails silently (pun intended) with a Win11 guest.

I even tried setting up Win10 first, sound works as expected and then upgraded it to Win11, at which time sound passthrough fails. Tried with and without Virtio-win guest tools installed and also checked if sound in Win11 generally works. It does. If I add a USB Soundblaster device to the VM, Win11 has no problems using that for sound output.

I'm kinda out of ideas here. There is nothing in the qemu logs, nor does Win11 complain about the Device, except this: "Speakers high definition audio device no jack information available." While that is the same for Win10 and Win11, my current theory is that it still might be the reason why Win11 fails to send sound to the host. So one question is, how do I pass 'jack information' to the guest? So far, my google-fu has proven too weak to find a solution.

Of course, it might be something entirely different, so if anyone has another idea what the problem might be and how to solve it, I'm up for it. I would prefer to stick with the PulseAudio though, reserving a possible switch to pipewire as the very last resort.