Re: ASoC: cs42l43: SDCA reattach timeout on Dell XPS 14 Panther Lake; chip stuck across distros and kernels; worked initially; still working at hardware level

[Tobias Bachmann <tobac@mailbox.org>]

On Thur, May 07, 2026, 05:35:37PM CEST, Charles Keepax wrote:
> Yeah I am afraid this looks like a hardware problem, enumerating on
> the SoundWire bus is pretty much only dependant on power rails.
>
> As you say there is a tiny hope the device has got into a weird state
> but isn't reset on a reboot. However, given it looks from the log like
> the amps were reset:
> 
> [   14.603448] cs35l56 sdw:0:2:01fa:3557:01:2: Cirrus Logic CS35L57
> Rev B2 OTP1 fw:4.2.1 (patched=0)
> 
> That patched=0 means the firmware has been wiped and that only happens
> on a reset and as far as I know the resets are tied together on this
> model. The very very long shot would be to let the battery run down
> and leave the device for a bit to try and super make sure the power
> rails went down which would also fully reset the device. But it is
> definitely a long shot.

I figured as much. I can take this up with Dell as a hardware issue, but
before I do, I wanted to ask about something architecturally:

Windows (or the Cirrus driver?) apparently treats the speakers and the
headphone jack as independent functional paths and can drive the
speakers fine despite the jack being non-responsive. The Linux driver
currently appears to bring up the sound hardware  as a whole, which 
means the headphone subfunction failing to reattach kills the entire 
card initialization, including the still-healthy amps.

Would it be reasonable to consider a degraded-mode behavior where the
driver proceeds with partial initialization when one subfunction fails,
as long as others remain reachable? My particular case is likely
hardware degradation, but I imagine similar failures could occur from
manufacturing defects, physical damage to the jack contact, or other
single-subfunction faults that don't render the whole chip unusable. The
current behavior makes such a laptop entirely silent in Linux while
still usable in Windows, which seems like a worse outcome than
necessary.

I realize this might be a significant change and there may be good
reasons it's not feasible with the current architecture. Happy to test
any patches.

Thanks again,
Tobias