Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE began the Linux 7.4 sound pull request by noting that "the AI flood continues" with there continuing to be a lot of new patches coming as a result of AI/LLM agents devising patches as well as uncovering new kernel bugs.
Takashi went on to explain that it was another busy cycle with changes in the sound subsystem from lots of core code hardening to new platforms and codecs as well. The core ALSA code has been hardened against some race conditions, there's a buffer leak fix in the compression offload code, race fixes in the JACK code, and other race conditions and more typical C bug fixes. The OSS sequencer emulation code has also been marked as deprecated for Linux 7.4.
On the hardware side, the Linux 7.4 sound updates include support for compressed audio playback on SOF IPC4 with Intel Tigerlake and newer. There is also AMD ACP 7.0/7.F sound IP support with SoundWire and the PDM controller. The new AMD ACP 7.0/7.F IP appears for upcoming Ryzen Zen 6 platforms.
There are also quirks for many different Intel/AMD laptops from the likes of Lenovo, ASUS, HP, AAcer, HONOR, MSI, and others.
New codec drivers are for the ESS ES9039Q2M, Nuvoton NAU83G60 amplifier, Senary SN624x SoundWire SDCA codec.
Also new is the Qualcomm QAIF driver for their Shikra platform.
More details on the many sound changes for Linux 7.4 via this pull ( https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/87ecdgc246.wl-tiwai@suse.de/ ).
it’s important to remember the zero-sum aspects of the game. The money isn’t destroyed, it just changes hands - usually to people who are less free with risky investment of it.
Just nitpicking to point out that this is very much not true when it comes to stock markets and the like. If a company is worth $100B and drops to $50B in the course of a week, no one else became $50B richer from that stock, not even collectively. Publicly traded companies usually don’t even have 100% of their stock at the exchange. It could very well be that only 5% of stock was traded throughout that week, meaning somewhere between $2.5B and $5B changed hands (assuming each share was only traded once). Yet $50B is gone from the market because there’s no one left willing to pay more than the valuation. That’s why the market is called volatile: it’s not based on concrete value but purely a measurement of what people are willing to pay for it based on sentiment that might change at any moment.