Dell Pro 16 Plus PB16250 - no audio

Support
21

First I am not the right person to try to help with audio problems. You probably know more about sound in Linux than I do. But if you keep doing the same thing over and over without results try something different.

This looks like what you need to resolve:

!!Soundcards recognised by ALSA
!!-----------------------------

--- no soundcards ---

If the system does not recognize your soundcard you won’t have sound.

Maybe figure out why your dmesg makes it look like sound is enabled but alsa does not see a soundcard.

Go where the knowledge is at OM-Chat.

Another thing is to try a more recent ROME iso and see if sound is broken in the ‘Live’ iso. Also try a Rock and/or a Cooker recent iso. If sound works on a recent install that definitely points to a problem within your system.

OpenMandriva forum is not the only place to ask questions about sound issues in Linux. Use internet search don’t ignore posts related to your problem a places like Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora, Arch Linux, and so on.

I am convinced that any issue posted in this forum for no results for 2 weeks should have a bug report. Personally I think it should be more like 1 week and file a bug report.

Edit: If you do an internet search of:

Linux Dell Pro 16 Plus PB16250 - no audio

There is a lot to read.

22

Is this permissions or something else?

It looks like pipewire at least recognized something:

PipeWire:
      Installed - Yes (/usr/bin/pipewire)
      Running - Yes

No sound servers found.


!!Soundcards recognised by ALSA
!!-----------------------------

 0 [sofsoundwire   ]: sof-soundwire - sof-soundwire
                      DellInc.-DellPro16PlusPB16250--0R3JVY


!!PCI Soundcards installed in the system
!!--------------------------------------

00:1f.3 Audio device [0403]: Intel Corporation Device [8086:7728] (prog-if 80)
	Subsystem: Dell Device [1028:0cf5]

The first thing I would try is to see if sound works on some OMLx iso ‘Live’.

I wish I could do more to help with this but lack of knowledge is in the way.

23

Hi, I tried the OpenMandrivaLx.rolling-snapshot.20251206.4338-plasma6wayland.x86_64.iso yesterday. The same result. No audio.

24

Call Dell customer service.

25

Hi, I have done something different. I tried the openSUSE-Tumbleweed-KDE-Live-x86_64-Snapshot20251216-Media.iso to boot from my USB stick three days ago.

I had to do several things.
I installed the sof-firmware package.
Then I ran two commands.

sudo modprobe -r snd_sof_pci_intel_mtl
sudo modprobe snd_sof_pci_intel_mtl

Finally I saw many good things in the alsa-info.txt.iStk3d8WJN.txt log file.
No dummy output. I looks that openSUSE has no problem with my sound card.

See the alsa-info.txt.iStk3d8WJN.txt (145.3 kB) file.

26

Have you tried doing the same thing in your OMLx system? We sof-firmware in our repos.

Remember if you have make changes to your OMLx system in trying to fix this you may need to undo some of them for this to work.

27

Hi,
I have installed the sof-firmware package from the rolling during one of updates.

Installed packages
Name            : sof-firmware
Epoch           : 0
Version         : 2025.05.1
Release         : 1
Architecture    : noarch
Installed size  : 30.9 MiB
Source          : sof-bin-2025.05.1-1.src.rpm
From repository : rolling-x86_64
Summary         : Various firmware data files for SOF drivers.
URL             : https://github.com/thesofproject/sof-bin
License         : BSD-3-Clause
Description     : Various firmware data files for SOF drivers.
Vendor          : OpenMandriva
28

I have just tried the Fedora 43 KDE Live from my USB stick.
I have just booted from the stick and everything works.
Just without any update.

See the http://alsa-project.org/db/?f=d99621f2da887465361d6758be3ae81447d07381 link.

See also my dmesg | grep sof log in the
dmesgFedora43Live.txt (4.0 kB) file.

As I previous wrote, openSUSE works, now Fedora even better. It is a pity that OpenMandriva does not work.

29

You could try the updated alsa-ucm-conf package from cooker which is on v1.2.15.1and has the latest (as of 3 days ago) ALSA config files for your hardware.

https://www.alsa-project.org/wiki/Changes_v1.2.14_v1.2.15#alsa-ucm-conf
https://www.alsa-project.org/wiki/Changes_v1.2.15_v1.2.15.1#alsa-ucm-conf

Looking at the alsa-ucm-conf changelog entries relating to sof-soundwire, cs42l43 and various fixes for the multi-codec they use combined with the various kernel fixes & backported fixes it seems that particular range of sound cards are not without their issues in both kernel and userland.

As an example there is a gigantic SOF issue thread relating to the same sound card you have:
[BUG] Audio driver fails to load on Dell XPS 16 2024 (9640) with a Cirrus Logic CS42L43 · Issue #4879 · thesofproject/linux · GitHub

I cannot promise this will work, but it is worth a shot as your issue seems more configuration related than kernel / kernel module or firmware related as your previous logs have shown the kernel modules and firmware are loaded but pipewire/pulse et al are not finding the device that ALSA should be providing.

You can try installing the updated alsa-ucm-conf package from cooker by running:
sudo dnf in alsa-ucm-conf --from-repo=cooker-x86_64 --refresh
(as you are on the x86_64 build)

I would reboot after installing that package and then check for any changes as you have been doing before.

If anything happens to go wonky you can always undo the alsa-ucm-conf package upgrade and reinstall the version you are on in rolling/ROME by using the functions of the dnf history --help command to undo the last item in dnf’s transaction history list.

30

Fedora has a package called “cirrus-audio-firmware.noarch”. I do not see anything like this for OM. I wonder if this package is needed to make the audio work.

31

The fedora package is created from kernel firmware, they split it out into a whole bunch of packages split by vendor.

We ship the Cirrus firmware as part of our kernel-firmware-extra package.

It may be worth a try installing the kernel-firmware-extra package if you have not already.

32

Hi,
I have installed the kernel-firmware-extra package from the rolling during one of updates.

Installed packages
Name            : kernel-firmware-extra
Epoch           : 0
Version         : 20251125
Release         : 1
Architecture    : noarch
Installed size  : 232.1 MiB
Source          : kernel-firmware-20251125-1.src.rpm
From repository : rolling-x86_64
Summary         : Extra linux kernel firmware files
URL             : https://www.kernel.org/
License         : Proprietary
Description     : This package contains extra redistributable etc. firmwares for in-kernel
                : drivers. It is shared for all kernels.
Vendor          : OpenMandriva
33

Thank you for your tip but it did not help.

See http://alsa-project.org/db/?f=470393fc5cda4c592fec0ecba90435eceb52c1eb
You can see at the bottom that I have installed the alsa-ucm-conf-1.2.15.1-1.noarch package.

I think I need to see this.


!!Loaded ALSA modules
!!-------------------

snd_soc_sof_sdw (card 0)

I see it for openSUSE and Fedora 43 only.

34

New kernel, no progress.

uname -a
Linux openmandriva-x8664 6.18.3-desktop-1omv2590 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Jan  2 23:20:53 UTC 2026 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

See http://alsa-project.org/db/?f=ecd1536c30f4ad657b52614720d7e6d77258420c

35

If your hardware is working properly in another distro you have a couple options.

  1. Collect the versions of the software being used for your system audio (i.e. alsa, pipewire, wireplumber, pulseaudio, etc…) and provide them here for comparison. Check your sound config files in the profile that is made when you use it in the other distro and it is working, then replicate those settings in OMLx and see if they work.
  2. Use the other distro.

At this point, it seems like there have not been a lot of simple things tried, and the expectation is the sound should just work without any exotic hardware or configurations (like HDMI into a pencil sharpener, etc…). If you cannot get your audio to work on just a pair of speakers using a stereo mini plug, then I would absolutely agree that we should be continuing down the path of kmods and other things. You have tried a number of kernels and it “doesn’t work.” It might be best to stick with option 2.

36

I have tried the new v2025.12 sof-bin. See https://github.com/thesofproject/sof-bin/releases/tag/v2025.12

It did not work too. See http://alsa-project.org/db/?f=6cf89f1866247775fea55ec82b7b71c4e40fd943

I have no idea what I should try. I am slowly thinking about the other distro.