Greetings to this Community and thanks for accepting me.
I recently bought a Huawei laptop, which comes with Windows, with the intention of installing Linux. I thought hardware support for standard commercial products was normal in 2022, but I was wrong. To my disappointment, I discovered that there is currently no driver for the ES8336 sound card and AMD processor.
I contacted Huawei, AMD and Everest Semiconductor (ES), but so far none of them seem interested in providing support.
I admit I was naive to think that a private company could start software development without expecting to make money from it (desktop Linux users are still a relatively small community, I think), but now I am curious to understand why there is so much hardware supported. What approach was used to convince the manufacturer to provide the drivers?


EDIT: I know that there has been a similar question in the past, but the answers were focused on solving the particular issue rather than addressing the topic in general.

There is no answer. They do what they want, what they think is most useful for them.
With those new hardware, we usually have to wait a few months or a year to have a working driver (on linux).

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They need a business reason to do so. Likely they will eventually as pan64 notes.

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OK, thank you.
I think you are right. The problem with the sound card goes back more than a year; I hope this means that the solution is close, despite the negative responses I'm getting...

You don't need a driver for an AMD processor. You need a linux distribution that has software, kernel, compiled to use the AMD processor instruction set. And that is just about every flavor of linux. Some flavors of Linux have separate .iso's for AMD and ia64.

ES8336 sound card

https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215119
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=273191
https://lkml.kernel.org/lkml/2022050...oundation.org/
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1375...336-sound-card

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Also found this:

https://forum.manjaro.org/t/cautious...-kernel/103812
https://github.com/thesofproject/linux/issues/3248
https://github.com/thesofproject/linux/pull/3107

Thank you for your clarification. I oversimplified because I don't expect to find the solution to my specific problem here. In fact I'm trying to explore unusual approaches after having checked also with the linux sof project community, who is on the front line for this topic. I've tried Kubuntu with the latest kernel, and also a custom kernel that solves the issue for intel systems. Then I was told that AMD is a different beast that requires specific developments (5.18 and 5.19 address es8336 only for intel platforms), the first step being having AMD developing a driver to integrate in the kernel.

Yes, I read further on that after I posted. Looks like there is work on it.

Yes, intel support is almost granted. But there is nothing regarding AMD apart from people complaining. You will see that I'm already active in AMD-related topics(as a complainer).

What issue are you seeing with Linux on that laptop, exactly?

Hi! The sound card is not detected, hence no sound...
https://github.com/thesofproject/linux/issues/3249

Support for that sound card was introduced into version 5.16 of the kernel this spring. You could try one of the distros listed here: 5.18 kernel

I can't see that a sound card would work differently with Intel and AMD. I've always used AMD desktops with no problems.

I'm a newbie, so don't take my word for it, but look at these threads:
https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=215119
https://github.com/thesofproject/linux/issues/3249

Apparently, AMD renoir requires a specific machine driver. People more expert than me have tried all distros and kernels and failed.

That link to github references this which does apparently have some success.
https://github.com/thesofproject/lin...ment-942790456

I see it is about an Alldocube GT Book, which has an Intel processor. As I said, support for Intel is almost ready, even if it needs some "ironing" and some case by case patch.
Have you seen somewhere anyone having success with an AMD powered laptop?