XPS 9700 Sound and Wifi linux510

I have a Dell XPS 9700 and the 5.10 kernal is supposed to fix sound and wifi driver issues. I installed the kernal through an AUR package but after enabling it I didn’t notice any difference.

Are there any additional steps needed in order to enable wifi and sound drivers?

It seems that 5.10 isn’t available through the Manjaro Kernel settings yet, what is the expected official availability of the kernal for Manjaro?

1 Like

I’m wondering about that too, it might take some time since the Manjaro team makes a few extra tests before the updates get to the repositories to keep things a bit more stable, Manjaro is always a bit behind Arch but it’s a little more stable due to some extra testing and fixes.

2 Likes

I’m using the Testing branch which includes 5.10.2 and the latest SOF Firmware and latest PulseAudio versions which should theoretically get sound working. Still does not work. Might be something I did on my end that messed it up. I’m waiting to see what happens to other XPS 17 9700 users.

1 Like

It looks like 5.10 is currently in testing:

I guess eventually it will move into stable but i don’t see any information as to an expected timeline.

@Julio_cSordi & @Mitch So it looks like 5.10 has been officially released. I installed it through the kernel manager tool and now my wifi is working! :slight_smile:

Upgraded manjaro and installed 5.10 however on the core i9 version of the XPS 17 configured with AX500 wifi, the wifi driver crashes on any attempt to connect to a 5Ghz network. Installing some of the earlier 5.10 kernels prior to this release via manual compilation did result in completely working wifi so it appears that the Ath11k driver has been subject to a fairly nasty regression.

I have that core i9 version of the xps 17 and I was able to connect to 5Ghz without a problem.

I did install the rebuild-detector package before. Not sure if that might have had an effect.

Very odd, i receive a core dump when attempting to connect to a 5Ghz network, 80Mhz or 40Mhz channel widths, requiring a reboot to restore. Re-installing firmware, disabling mac randomization and ipv6 has proved ineffective. Connected without issue on the latest kernel revisions from the manjaro kernel build repositories. At this stage I’m at a complete loss.

Perhaps chiming in with a different issue, but 5.10 was not the magical cure to my audio issues that I was led to believe. Nothing changed from 5.9 in that regard.

Regarding audio, 5.10 ought to include all kernel sound wire drivers by default. On a fresh install the only missing package appeared to be sof-firmware and following installation resolved the remaining audio configuration issues.

Returning to the AX500 issue, apparently installing manjaro on a btrfs root partition causes the aforementioned failures to occur; on an ext4 filesystem the driver performs correctly.

I want to add that I had installed the new audio drivers before installing the 510 kernel.

On the wifi front, I am having stability issues although in general I can connect and the wifi card is recognized.

Are you also not getting sound? I re-installed all my stuff and didn’t get it. My Wifi is good only if I turn WIFI power saving off in TLP. I have the i7 Model without the dedicated GPU.

I fixed my issue and got all my sound working on my XPS.

I did these steps to sort things out:

  1. Delete alsa.conf and alsa-base.conf from /etc/modprobe.d/ ( I think I added these two files back before 5.10 when I was trying to get speakers working.)
  2. Reinstalled the sound stuff: sudo pacman -S pulseaudio sof-firmware alsa alsa-ucm-conf
  3. Rebooted.
1 Like