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The SOF technical steering committee is pleased to announce the 2.11.0 release of SOF.

Highlights

• New platforms: AMD ACP7.0, Intel Panther Lake.
• Multiple bugfixes and improvements to HIFI4 optimizations.
• Topology: Support for multiple new Intel MTL/LNL/ARL-based devices.
• Topology: Beamformer (TDBF) and Dynamic Range Compressor (DRC) added to HDA generic topology for Intel platforms (see diagram). These are by default in passthrough mode and will require a device-specific setup either via UCM files or via alsamixer configuration.

• Enhanced render and capture pipelines:
  • When set up, the enhanced render pipeline improves notebook speaker playback quality with a better frequency response for a more natural sound and better loudness with less non-linear distortion when played loudly.
  • When set up, the enhanced capture pipeline improves loudness of silent sounds and amplifies sound arriving from the look direction of a microphone array in notebooks with a slight reduction of noise in the same process.

Learn more about the release here.

Signed binaries for selected Intel platforms are here.

Highlights

• New stable platforms in binary release: Intel Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake S.
• Basic set of algorithms extended (DRC, FIR, IIR) in multiple common upstream DSP topologies. Example configuration has been submitted to upstream alsa-ucm (alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf#419) showing how to hook product-specific audio tuning and distribute them via alsa-ucm.
• Features: Zephyr shell support (debug tool for developers).
• Topologies: New topologies added for multiple Intel Meteor and Lunar Lake devices.

Learn more about the release here.

Signed binaries for selected Intel platforms are here.

Highlights

• Major performance optimizations to audio modules: Aria, Mixin/Mixout, DRC
• Improvements to loadable module support, both with native SOF and the new Zephyr Linkable Loadable Extensions https://docs.zephyrproject.org/latest/services/llext/index.html
• New components migrated to Module API: RTNR, IGO_NR
• Topologies: new Intel and NXP topologies; updates exiting topologies
• Numerous bugfixes

Learn more about the release here.

Signed binaries for selected Intel platforms are here.

Highlights

• New platforms support: AMD ACP6.3
• New Data Processing (DP) Queue functionality added: Provides new capabilities to connect pipelines across DSP cores, and to connect modules with different processing rates.
• New modules: SRC Lite
• New components migrated to Module API: DC Block, Google RTC, ASRC
• New tools: SOF ALSA plugin added that can run SOF pipelines on generic Linux host
• Refactored Smart Amp module: Added a new two-layer structure – a generic common part and an implementation-specific inner part.
• Topology2.0 Infrastructure: Added ALSA enum and switch controls support, new benchmarking topologies, and updated Doxygen documentation.
• Topologies: New AMD Soundwire, multiple new/updated Intel Meteor Lake topologies
• Zephyr updated to 3.5 baseline (for Zephyr based SOF builds).

Learn more about the release here.

Signed binaries for selected Intel platforms are here.

SOF 2.7.0 focuses on optimization of key audio components and extends the usage of Zephyr as the RTOS for SOF.

Highlights

• New platforms support: AMD Van Gogh
• Performance optimizations to audio components: Aria, Volume, Time Domain Fixed Beamformer (TDFB), MFCC Feature Extractor
• Pipeline 2.0: Work has begun to improve the pipeline framework aimed at reducing memory consumption and supporting distributing pipelines across multiple DSP cores.
• Improved audio stub infrastructure to help with 3rd-party module integration.
• Zephyr Ready: First-production quality SOF platform released for Meteor Lake using native Zephyr RTOS.

Learn more about the release here.

Signed binaries for selected Intel platforms are here.

SOF 2.6.0 focuses on optimization of key audio components and extends the usage of Zephyr as the RTOS for SOF.

Highlights:

• New platforms support: NXP i.MX93 and initial Intel Lunar Lake.
• Performance optimizations to audio components: dcblocker, eq-fir and copier; increased usage of HiFi4 SIMD.
• More native Zephyr platforms: Intel cAVS2.5
• Initial support for non built-in libraries.
• Support to run SOF as Zephyr POSIX target on Linux for faster feature development and fuzzing.
• Continuing hardening of IPC and Zephyr.

Learn more about the release here.

SOF 2.5.0 includes the following highlights:

• New platforms support: Mediatek mt8188
• New audio modules: ARIA (Automatic Regressive Input Amplifier Module)
• New modules migrated to Module API: SRC
• Significant performance optimizations: dcblock (upto 50%). mixer (upto 18%), volume (upto 15%), copier (upto 33%), eqiir
• Continued adoption of Zephyr native interfaces in the SOF application code: module initialization now done with SYS_INIT(), removal of XTOS dependency in idc.h/task.h/io.h interfaces.
• Removal of legacy Intel platforms — support for these platforms will continue via the SOF stable-v2.2 branch. The remaining Intel platforms in SOF mainline all use Zephyr as the RTOS.

Learn more about the release here.

SOF 2.4.1 is the first release using Zephyr RTOS with native Zephyr device drivers (on some Intel platforms) and Windows IPC. This should be the last “opt-in” intermediary release as code is transitioned to support Zephyr RTOS, topology2, Module API, and IPC abstraction (IPC3/4) support.

Highlights:

• Zephyr RTOS with Zephyr device drivers on the Intel Tigerlake platform as a user “opt-in.” The default is TGL (xtos) on v2.2.
• IPC configuration now defaults to IPC4 (version used on Windows) on Intel platforms; topology has been upgraded to version 2.
• Lots of processing optimizations and increased use of SIMD intrinsics in hot processing code.
• About 50% of processing modules have been upgraded to the new Module API alongside the initial introduction of IADK API (to support reuse of 3rd party modules from Windows).
• Support for Cadence MP3 and AAC decoders (IPC3 only atm).

Learn more about the release here.

SOF 2.3 is the first release to use Zephyr as the RTOS on selected platforms! It includes the following features:

• Support for next-generation AMD Rembrandt and Intel Raptor Lake platforms.
• The Zephyr RTOS is available on the Intel Tiger Lake platform as a user “opt-in”; the default is TGL (xtos) on v2.2.
• SIMD (Hifi3/4) Performance improvements have been made on the mixer, copier, PCM converter, and volume components with up to 25-60% speed improvement depending on the use case.
• SPARE support has been added to the codebase and is used to partition memory pointers into cache and uncache types.

Learn more about the release here.

SOF 2.2 includes the following features:

• The codec adapter is now the module adapter and its API reflects the same API used by the Windows processing modules. This allows 3rd-party processing ISVs to reuse existing code from Windows without any modifications.
• Optimizations
  • The Frag API has been deprecated which results in a ~1MCPS improvement per component.
  • The Frame API has been added. It pre-calculates block sizes for SIMD/non SIMD use cases which results in a ~0.25MCPS improvement.
• Processing modules/components
  • A new up mix and down mix module has been added with support for HiFi4; it can up/down mix the number of channels in a stream.
• Zephyr
  • Native APIs have been for logging, delays, and sleeping. SOF Should be fully Zephyr Native by v2.3.
• IPC4 additions have been made to enable more advanced use cases and audio endpoints for Windows.

Learn more about the release here.