Linux 7.1 finally fixes a 2-year-old Steam Deck OLED audio issue

If you’ve owned a Steam Deck OLED for a few years, you may have noticed that the Linux 6.8 kernel messed up its audio probe. This happened in late 2023 and for years people were waiting for a fix to be released for this. Turns out the lack of updates wasn’t because no one cared, but because the glitch required some delicate care to make sure it didn’t break everything else in the process.

Well, the Steam Deck OLED audio issue has now been resolved and the fix has been merged into Linux version 7.1-rc2. And if testing goes smoothly, Steam Deck OLED owners should get their audio probes back in a few weeks.

Linux 7.1 fixes a two-year-old issue with the Steam Deck OLED

The LCD model escaped unscathed

As spotted by Phoronix, a new patch has been merged into Linux 7.1. Titled “ASoC: amd: acp: Add DMI quirk for Valve Steam Deck OLED” and written by Guilherme G. Piccoli, the patch aims to repair the Steam Deck OLED audio probe which stopped working two years ago. The problem did not affect the LCD model; it’s just the OLED version that was affected.

However, as Piccoli says, calling the functionality “broken” is an exaggeration:

Commit 671dd2ffbd8b introduced a change that “broke” the Steam Deck audio probe, in the OLED model

…

Note the quotes in “broken”: this is not really a bug in such a commit, but rather a problem with a Steam Deck OLED topology file. This was widely discussed in , and Cristian came up with a fairly simple and functional change that fixed the Deck’s problem. This change, however, would break other devices, so it was not agreed to upfront. And the proper solution suggested (fix the topology) was never implemented, so Valve core (and anyone wanting to start mainline on Steam Deck OLED) is making this fix downstream.

Piccoli’s proposed solution was to use a “DMI quirk” to ensure the audio issue was fixed with the Steam Deck OLED, without the code changes affecting other devices. This way the fix will only affect Steam Deck OLEDs and won’t break things on other computers. It appears that the solution was good, since the fix has since been merged into Linux version 7.1-rc2, which should be released for testing very soon.