<p>A two-year-old audio bug affecting the Steam Deck OLED on the mainline Linux kernel has finally been fixed, landing in Linux 7.1-rc2.</p>
<h2>What broke and when</h2>
<p>The regression traces back to a commit merged in Linux 6.8 (2023) that changed AMD Audio Co-Processor machine driver code. That change inadvertently broke audio initialization on the Steam Deck OLED — the LCD model was unaffected. The root cause turned out to be a topology file issue in the OLED’s firmware rather than a straightforward kernel bug, which is part of why a proper upstream fix took so long.</p>
<p>Valve’s downstream kernel carried a workaround the whole time, so OLED owners running SteamOS weren’t left without audio. But anyone running a mainline kernel on the device was out of luck.</p>
<h2>Why the fix took two years</h2>
<p>The tricky part was that any naive fix would break other devices. The change needed to be scoped specifically to Steam Deck OLED hardware. Igalia’s Guilherme G. Piccoli solved this by implementing a DMI quirk that targets only the OLED model, leaving everything else untouched. That approach cleared the path for merging upstream.</p>
<h2>What else is in 7.1-rc2</h2>
<p>The audio fix isn’t the only thing in this release candidate. 7.1-rc2 also includes:</p>
<ul>
<li>Additional NTFS filesystem driver fixes</li>
<li>Improvements for older AMD GPUs, contributed by Valve’s Timur Kristóf</li>
<li>Intel Xe3P graphics workarounds</li>
<li>sched_ext fixes following AI-assisted code review and fuzzing</li>
</ul>
<h2>When to expect it</h2>
<p>The patch is merged into 7.1-rc2, available now on <a href="http://kernel.org" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">kernel.org</a>. The stable release is a few weeks out pending testing. Backports to stable kernel series are also being considered.</p>


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A two-year-old audio regression affecting the Steam Deck OLED on mainline Linux kernels has been fixed in Linux 7.1-rc2. The bug originated from a Linux 6.8 commit that altered AMD Audio Co-Processor driver code, inadvertently breaking audio initialization on the OLED model due to a firmware topology file issue. Valve's downstream SteamOS kernel carried a workaround throughout, but mainline kernel users were affected. Igalia's Guilherme G. Piccoli resolved it using a DMI quirk scoped specifically to the OLED hardware to avoid breaking other devices. The 7.1-rc2 release also includes NTFS driver fixes, older AMD GPU improvements from Valve's Timur Kristóf, Intel Xe3P graphics workarounds, and sched_ext fixes following AI-assisted code review and fuzzing. The stable release is expected in a few weeks, with backports to stable kernel series under consideration.

Linux 7.1 fixes Steam Deck OLED audio regression that sat broken for two years