XPS 17 sound issue with 21.04

So 2 days ago I got a popup to update from 20.10 to 21.04 and like a moron I proceeded to it even though I knew that my XPS 17 was sorta tricky to get everything to work with 20.10 to begin with as detailed in my previous post:How to install Ubuntu 20.10 on the new XPS 17 (9700)?

In any case everything seems to work except for the sound again as it seems to be the case with other people as well but the method I used to make it work with 20.10 doesn't seem to work with 21.04.

That part now seemed useless because everything was already on my system:

git clone
cd soundwire-dkms
git checkout latest-sofproject
cd ..
sudo mv soundwire-dkms /usr/src/soundwire-1.4.0
sudo dkms add soundwire/1.4.0
sudo dkms build soundwire/1.4.0
sudo dkms install soundwire/1.4.0

As evidenced with this error message: alex@alex-XPS-17-9700:~$ sudo dkms add soundwire/1.4.0

[sudo] password for alex:
Error! DKMS tree already contains: soundwire-1.4.0
You cannot add the same module/version combo more than once.

So then I went to the next section, using the latest version:

wget
tar xf sof-firmware-1.7-2-any.pkg.tar.*
sudo mv /usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof /usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof.bak
sudo mv /usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof-tplg /usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof-tplg.bak
sudo cp -r usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof/sof /usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof
sudo cp -r usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof/sof-tplg-v1.6/ /usr/lib/firmware/intel/sof-tplg

Then still no sound so I rebooted and yet nothing. I saw a few other posts that mentionned how to modify the kernel to make it work and I had a crack at it - using this guy's process:

But I dont think I'm doing it right as it ran for a good while and ended up giving me a bunch of error messages after this command:

make -j 16 deb-pkg LOCALVERSION=-custom KDEB_PKGVERSION=$(make kernelversion)-1

...

 GEN .version CHK include/generated/compile.h LD vmlinux.o MODPOST vmlinux.symvers MODINFO modules.builtin.modinfo GEN modules.builtin BTF: .tmp_vmlinux.btf: pahole (pahole) is not available Failed to generate BTF for vmlinux Try to disable CONFIG_DEBUG_INFO_BTF make[3]: *** [Makefile:1177: vmlinux] Error 1 make[2]: *** [debian/rules:7: build-arch] Error 2 dpkg-buildpackage: error: debian/rules binary subprocess returned exit status 2 make[1]: *** [scripts/Makefile.package:77: deb-pkg] Error 2 make: *** [Makefile:1548: deb-pkg] Error 2

Ideally I'd avoid the kernel solution as I don't know much about kernel configurations if it's not already obvious -_-

Hopefully someone can help, Thanks

1 Answer

I had the same problem with my XPS laptop and I had the same error due to building a kernel. I've fixed that error by using a method described in this post

P.S. unfortunately, I could not find any other solutions for fixing sound problem except building the kernel with a custom configuration.