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fhftsai256

Member

Registered: 2020-05-12

Posts: 14

[SOLVED] Dell XPS 13 9315: Microphone not picking up audio

At first I thought it was related with Intel ipu6 camera DKMS module when following with this famous thread because there are several mentions on page 3, but then I managed to reproduce the problem before installing ipu6 driver stack. The symptom is that the microphone is detected, but is not picking up any audio, and somewhat resonates with this post. I have reinstalled the system many times to narrow down possible ways to reproduce this behavior.

The audio device is detected as below:

Audio:
  Device-1: Intel vendor: Dell driver: intel-ipu6 bus-ID: 5-1.3.4:6 alternate: intel_ipu6,
    intel_ipu6_psys, intel_ipu6_isys chip-ID: 0bda:48f0 bus-ID: 0000:00:05.0 chip-ID: 8086:465d
    class-ID: 0300 class-ID: 0480
  Device-2: Intel vendor: Dell driver: sof-audio-pci-intel-tgl
    alternate: snd_hda_intel,snd_sof_pci_intel_tgl bus-ID: 0000:00:1f.3 chip-ID: 8086:51cc
    class-ID: 0401
  Device-3: Generic USB Audio type: USB driver: hid-generic,usbhid
  API: ALSA v: k6.2.13-arch1-1 status: kernel-api tools: alsamixer,amixer
  Server-1: sndiod v: N/A status: off tools: aucat,midicat,sndioctl
  Server-2: PipeWire v: 0.3.70 status: active with: 1: pipewire-pulse status: active
    2: wireplumber status: active 3: pipewire-alsa type: plugin 4: pw-jack type: plugin
    tools: pactl,pw-cat,pw-cli,wpctl

Start right after a fresh install with archinstall script (profile=desktop,sway,pipewire). The speaker can play properly, but the microphone is only picking up white noise. Under pauvcontrol one can see the microphone intensity bar fluctuates at very low volume. From here I can enable the microphone to the correct working state with following methods:
1. "sudo alsactl init" when the microphone is picking up white noise. (As mentioned in the thread above)
2. Boot into Ubuntu or Fedora live CD, and hot reboot back into Arch.

This would only work once, unfortunately. Microphone level will stay zero flat after reboot (not even picking up white noise), and none of the methods above can re-activate it again until a fresh OS reinstall. Several additional measures were also attempted without success:
* set dsp_driver=1, which prevents sof-firmware from loading, rendering the audio device not showing up.
* reinstall sof-firmware with pacman -Rnc.
* modprobe -r snd_sof_pci_intel_tgl  && modprobe snd_sof_pci_intel_tgl.

The microphone can still work when booting into Ubuntu live CD, so I ran alsa-info.sh from there and trying to see if there's any differences between those environments:
Arch, working microphone, activated by booting into Ubuntu Live CD
Arch, dead microphone
Ubuntu Live CD, working microphone, booted back in after microphone was dead in Arch

Not really confident about where shall I look at, but seems like the some controller definitions are messed up:

[Update] Dived into alsamixer and switched to the proper sound card (sof-soundwire). Turns out the PGA5.0 5 Master controller is disabled.

Last edited by fhftsai256 (2023-05-03 14:18:07)