Asus Zephyrus G14 - Cirrus CS35L56 amp not engaging

[btalcox0715]

Hi there--

Getting Gentoo all installed on my Asus laptop, and it has a newly supported Cirrus speaker amp (CS35L56). I'm currently building off of the mainline kernel (6.9-r7) since support is so new and only included there. The problem I'm facing is that the amp isn't "engaging"--the sound is all tinny and thin. I faced the same issue initially on Arch, but once i moved to 6.9-rc7 and downloaded the latest firmware, the amp fully kicked in and sound was great.

I was fairly confident I had everything I needed selected in the kernel, but I'm definitely missing something somewhere since I can't see anything about the device loading firmware or modules, but I at least know it's possible since my Arch install is working

[btalcox0715]

Here is the output from ARCH Linux where it does work:

[btalcox0715]

I’ve got some progress here, and it makes sense (as it generally does with kernel config)—I’m missing something. With the GA release of 6.9.0, I switched to gentoo-sources-6.9.0 and recompiled—no change (to be expected). I tinkered for most of the day googling and researching my hardware, reading through the kernel source, etc but still could not get this thing to be recognized. I finally took the nuclear approach and grabbed the default gentoo kernel config, compiled the kernel, generated an initramfs with Dracut, booted and voila it works! I figured maybe it had something to do with providing an initramfs, so I generated one for my manually configured kernel, but no change.

How do I work backwards from here? I have a massively bloated kernel and initramfs that works, and something in here is making this device work—what’s the best way to isolate what is causing it to kick in?

Thanks in advance!

[pietinger]

For a manual kernel configuration, I always recommend booting our Gentoo dist-kernel (or Ubuntu LiveCD or ArchLinux) and using “lsmod” to check which modules have been loaded (*). These should then also be activated in the manual kernel configuration. Unfortunately, there are some options that have not been configured as <m>odule, but statically <*> and therefore do not appear in the list of “lsmod”. One of the most important options for an AMD notebook is e.g:

[btalcox0715]

[pietinger]