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I got a new LG Gram laptop (see specs -> 1) and immediately replaced windows with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I had no issues with installation other than I have no sound. I am aware of many threads discussing this and I have been troubleshooting for hours. Nothing thus far has worked for me hence why I am asking this question to a community. I will provide as much information as I can regarding what "solutions" I have already tried. Hopefully someone can help me.

Solution 1

Firstly I ran through the troubleshooting steps built into Ubuntu's help application:

  1. Checked in system settings that sound was not muted
  2. Check the correct sound device was connected (I only had the option "Speaker-sof-hda-dsp")
  3. Executed lspci -v which returned the following output relevant to audio:
00:1f.3 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation Device a0c8 (rev 20)
    Subsystem: LG Electronics, Inc. Device 0400
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 166
    Memory at 603d188000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
    Memory at 603d000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=1M]
    Capabilities: [50] Power Management version 3
    Capabilities: [80] Vendor Specific Information: Len=14 <?>
    Capabilities: [60] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
    Kernel driver in use: sof-audio-pci
    Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel, snd_sof_pci

I noticed hear that the Kernel driver in use could potentially be set to snd_hda_intel so investigated this.

Solution 2

  1. I tried to reinstall pulseaudio and alsa to no avail, sudo apt-get install --reinstall alsa-base pulseaudio & sudo alsa force-reload.
  2. I checked in alsamixer that nothing was muted and tried playing around with manually changing the system sound card but still no sound.

Screen capture of AlsaMixer information

Solution 3

I opened sudo gedit /etc/default/grub and changed:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

to

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash snd_hda_intel.dmic_detect=0"

After this I executed sudo update-grub and rebooted my system. I could confirm the driver was changed using aplay -l but I still had no sound. I gathered more information using modinfo snd_hda_intel:

parm:           dmic_detect:Allow DSP driver selection (bypass this driver) (0=off, 1=on) (default=1); deprecated, use snd-intel-dspcfg.dsp_driver option instead (bool)

Also modinfo snd_intel_dspcfg provided:

parm:           dsp_driver:Force the DSP driver for Intel DSP (0=auto, 1=legacy, 2=SST, 3=SOF) (int)

Following another thread I also added snd_intel_dspcfg.dsp_driver=1 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT continuing to update grub and reboot. Still nothing.

Solution 4

First I reset the solution 3, then I performed the following:

  1. Added options snd-hda-intel dmic_detect=0 to etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base.conf.
  2. Added blacklist snd_soc_skl to etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf.
  3. Reboot

Still no luck. So I have undone these changes for now.

Further Information

User:~$ inxi -SMA
System:    Host: Ryan-Ubuntu-Laptop Kernel: 5.8.0-43-generic x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: Gnome 3.36.4 
           Distro: Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS (Focal Fossa) 
Machine:   Type: Laptop System: LG product: 16Z90P-K.AA78A1 v: 0.1 serial: <superuser/root required> 
           Mobo: LG model: 16Z90P v: FAB1 serial: <superuser/root required> UEFI: Phoenix v: T2ZF0250 X64 
           date: 01/04/2021 
Audio:     Device-1: Intel driver: sof-audio-pci 
           Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.8.0-43-generic 

Any help at all would be much appreciated as I want to get the system up and running to work on.

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  • 1
    This post is duplicated in the super users forum -> link. This is a reported bug that has been submitted to be fixed at the Kernel level -> link Mar 24, 2021 at 19:29
  • I should correct the above to say its not really a bug but rather a shortcoming of hardware support. Apr 20, 2021 at 0:31
  • Two years later, was this bug fixed? I've just bought a 2023 17Z90R, and sound doesn't work on Kubuntu 22, or Fedora 37 or 38. Apr 20, 2023 at 3:49

1 Answer 1

0

(I already posted this reply here: Similar Question)

Hi, I'm not sure if you are still looking for a fix to this issue, but thank God and all the amazing people who researched this, I found a fix after a few tough days of research. I have an LG Gram 17 with ALC256 and Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) and both my speakers and microphones were not detected. I made a video tutorial on how to fix it, and I also wrote a guide. If you want the video, here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz6jDUyn7S0

Here is a guide I wrote (at your own risk!) on how to fix the issue step by step if you don't want to watch the video:

Step 1 - Remove (backup) the old SOF drivers from your system:
a) sudo mv /lib/firmware/intel/sof* ~/Desktop/old-sof-backup
b) sudo mv /usr/local/bin/sof-* ~/Desktop/old-sof-backup

Step 2 - Download and install the newer drivers from the SOF Project Github repo:
Link: https://github.com/thesofproject/sof-bin

a) Open the directory for your desired SOF version in terminal, let's assume v2.1.1.
b) sudo rsync -a sof*v2.1.1 /lib/firmware/intel/
c) sudo ln -s sof-v2.1.1 /lib/firmware/intel/sof
d) sudo ln -s sof-tplg-v2.1.1 /lib/firmware/intel/sof-tplg
e) sudo rsync tools-v2.1.1/* /usr/local/bin

(If you don't want to use symbolic links, refer to the repository for instructions on how to install the drivers without symbolic links)

Step 3 - Download and install the fixes/patches from the following SOF Project Github repo:
Link: https://github.com/thesofproject/alsa-ucm-conf/tree/sof_ucm1

(Remove the old "/usr/share/alsa/ucm" directory and replace it with the newly downloaded one from the repo)
a) sudo rm -r /usr/share/alsa/ucm
b) sudo mv ./ucm /usr/share/alsa

Step 4 - REBOOT
After you reboot, all your speakers, microphones and everything will show up and will be working. HOWEVER, the microphone input and speakers volume will be lower than usual. Step 5-6 are the fix for this.

Step 5 - Raise the input/output volume using ALSAMIXER (after rebooting!)
a) Open alsamixer in terminal.
b) Press F5 to show all devices.
c) Raise everything (or what you need) to the maximum value possible.

Step 6 - Save the ALSAMIXER settings permanently for each reboot
(we use the first "store" command once to store the settings in the designated file, then each time you reboot, the "restore" command will restore the settings from this file)

a) alsactl --file ~/.config/asound.state store
b) Set the command alsactl --file ~/.config/asound.state restore to run automatically on each startup so that the stored alsamixer settings in step 6(a) are always restored.

Cheers to the lads here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=249900&p=4

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  • LM is not Ubuntu. It is off topic here. May 6, 2022 at 19:33
  • It is not really off-topic if it works on Ubuntu. If you open the aforementioned archlinux forums post, you will see that it was first tested and worked on Ubuntu, and then on Arch. It is clearly a cross-distro solution as far as I see.
    – Michael
    May 7, 2022 at 11:28
  • Thank you so much for taking the time to post here and make a video. Unfortunately, it does not solve my issue, although I believe it will help many people. For my case I do not have a dummy output or problems detecting 'sof' in the sound settings, but rather the drivers are simply not present at the kernel level. The resolution to this issue for my specific laptop has been shared in my other post (see superuser.com/questions/1627065/…). Annoyingly there is no way to resolve it without booting into Windows. May 13, 2022 at 13:58

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