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$1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux
- andix 10mo agoI guess this here is what the title is describing: https://github.com/nadimkobeissi/16iax10h-linux-sound-saga/blob/main/PLEDGE.md https://github.com/nadimkobeissi/16iax10h-linux-sound-saga/b...
- jokowueu 10mo agoOh it's written by Nadim Kobeissi, such a huge fan of his work didn't expect him see him here
- phoe-krk 10mo agoIn the README: > Approximately 95% of the engineering work was done by Lyapsus. Lyapsus improved an incomplete kernel driver, wrote new kernel codecs and side-codecs, and contributed much more. I want to emphasize his incredible kindness and dedication to solving this issue. He is the primary force behind this fix, and without him, it would never have been possible. > I (Nadim Kobeissi) conducted the initial investigation that identified the missing components needed for audio to work on the 16IAX10H on Linux. Building on what I learned from Lyapsus's work, I helped debug and clean up his kernel code, tested it, and made minor improvements. I also contributed the solution to the volume control issue documented in Step 8, and wrote this guide.
- ZeroConcerns 10mo ago[flagged]
- kykat 10mo agoI am literally unable to understand what's being said here
- andix 10mo agoAngry racist shouting at people.
- QuarterReptile 10mo agoPeople might be willing to interact with your idea of you removed the snark, if you think it's a discussion worth having.
- opengrass 10mo agoThe machine easily cost a million to develop and it's easy to throw money at a problem for the unemployed tinkerers out there.
- pessimizer 10mo agoActually, the mercenary garbage that Lenovo started doing was absolutely hateful. I'd been tearing my hair out forever trying to figure out why nothing I could do would make my bluetooth work right on an old T430, even when I upgraded the chip. Assumed it was a Linux bug. Turns out that Lenovo put awful bluetooth in the laptop, and made it ignore any other bluetooth chip you installed (you can get around this in Linux by force ignoring what the system reports.) I have no idea why you would do that except out of spite; I don't remember them selling bluetooth upgrades or anything. They were just keeping their options open? This is aside from having to hack the bios in order to upgrade wireless or use generic batteries. I would be awesome if the people that sold me products weren't awful people. They don't have to feel bad about it, but they should. I don't care that you're angrier at Apple than at Lenovo. I'm angrier at the electric company, but I don't bring it up to defend my local alderman. I also don't care that FOSS hasn't solved all your problems for free like they apparently promised you they would.
- amitav1 10mo agoTitle should be: $2000 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovoe Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux
- AshamedCaptain 10mo agoI wish there was an actual thriving business model like this -- just fixing most annoying bugs, for a price, of commonly used desktop software. Why proprietary software companies cannot or do not want to provide this service is over me. Perhaps I'm too much used to consulting.
- tormeh 10mo agoYeah, you'd want some sort of micro-kickstarting website where users can pool money that goes into paying for some fix or feature if the committed money crosses a threshold.
- kgwxd 10mo agoThe paperwork.
- kykat 10mo agoI think that 2k is really really cheap for the expertise in kernel development
- AlotOfReading 10mo agoIt is, but it's amazing how cheap kernel expertise is relative to comparable experience in other specialties like frontend.
- convolvatron 10mo agothere are a lot more kernel programmers than kernel work
- TZubiri 10mo agoBut also lots of kernel developers work for free, so the average price of their work is very low
- cyphar 10mo ago"Lots" is a relative term, but the overwhelming majority of kernel developers are employed and usually do kernel work as part of their job (usually at least ~80% but it could be argued as high as 97% depending on how you interpret the breakdown done by LWN of each release[1]). [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/1038358/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1038358/
- jey 10mo agoAnd the person who did the implementation, Lyapsus, did it without access to the hardware?? https://github.com/nadimkobeissi/16iax10h-linux-sound-saga/issues/7 https://github.com/nadimkobeissi/16iax10h-linux-sound-saga/i...
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- Nition 10mo agoThat thread is a fun (though frustrating for them!) conversation to read through. After about a hundred back-and-forths getting the guy with the actual hardware to try different commands, I was thinking to myself man, maybe he should just give him remote access to work on the target PC, this is torture for both of them. And then I see him comment: > Honestly I'm thinking of this and maybe something insane like organizing ssh access or something to quit torturing Nadim with building and rebooting all the time And Nadim replies: > Haha, sorry, but there's no way I'm giving you SSH access! > I’m fine with continuing with tests! Which is fair enough! But was funny to see right when I was thinking the same thing. Great perseverance from both of them. Was slightly disappointing they they moved off GitHub to Discord eventually so after all that, we miss the moment of them actually getting it working!
- jmakov 10mo agoWhere are LLMs now?
- akatsutki 10mo agoThey're not useful for fixing things like this. Only frontend React.js
- hackyhacky 10mo ago> Only frontend React.js Good suggestion, but I discovered that React was not able to fix my Linux kernel, either, for some reason.
- mrbombastic 10mo agoHave you tried asking an llm to use react to fix your Linux kernel?
- harvey9 10mo agoCould an AI agent kidnap Torvalds and force him to do it?
- worthless-trash 10mo agoYes, and its shit.
- khannn 10mo agoVibe coder: "ChatGPT, please fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux" Hal3000: "Great request—here is your React version 20XX* TODO list" *20XX is a year+ old version of React
- Thaxll 10mo agoYou're wrong: https://words.filippo.io/claude-debugging/ https://words.filippo.io/claude-debugging/ https://dmitrybrant.com/2025/09/07/using-claude-code-to-modernize-a-25-year-old-kernel-driver https://dmitrybrant.com/2025/09/07/using-claude-code-to-mode...
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoPatching up the kernel to get some sound coming out of the speakers.. Very on brand for Linux.
- oasisaimlessly 10mo agoHow do you know somebody has no idea what they're talking about? They'll tell you.
- transcriptase 10mo agoShow us on the doll where they’re wrong.
- krackers 10mo agoI'm guessing it's the fact that linux has in-tree drivers, so you necessarily need to "patch the kernel" in order to write/fix a driver for a non-standard compliant device?
- realusername 10mo agoHow else is that supposed to work? You either fix a driver in the kernel or a driver outside the kernel, it's not going to make that big of a difference to the person who has to fix it.
- jdiff 10mo agoThe difference is that the end user doesn't have to do it. Someone else is going to do it. Just like it is on Windows.
- realusername 10mo agoThat only works because Windows has a large marketshare, the day it drops to 10%, users will have to write their own drivers as well
- iamcreasy 10mo agoHere is another[1] fine read that was post recently. Author fixed media button issue for old 2005 Fujitsu keyboard and pushed it to kernel. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490652
- jauntywundrkind 10mo agoInterestingly the Awinc aw88399 smart amplifier chip at the core of this issue allegedly got supporting in 6.7, in 2023. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.7-Sound https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-6.7-Sound I have a couple old-ish Samsung Galaxy Book x86 tablets that have a similar issue, that I have never quite goaded myself into trying to reverse engineer. I'd love some better material on trying to reverse engineer windows drivers: presumably maybe running windows in qemu with some kind of intercepting pass through?
- nubinetwork 10mo agoIf only people would do these bounties for ITE sensor hubs.
- espdev 10mo agoThere is a common problem with Realtek ALC3306 on Linux (Kernel Bug 213159). This affects many Lenovo laptop models. For example, my fairly old Legion S7 15IMH5 laptop also does not work. I'm not willing to pay $1000 for a fix (it's easier for me to buy a new laptop that will work with Linux), but $100 is probably okay. :)
- toast0 10mo ago$100 gets you a usb sound card and $90 for something else. It's not a good solution, but it's easy.
- espdev 10mo agoThe sound only does not work from the laptop speakers; wired headphones work perfectly. Sometimes you want your laptop speakers to produce sound. So an external sound card does not solve the problem. It's funny, but for as long as I can remember Linux (20+ years), there have always been some problems with sound.
- toast0 10mo agoYou can buy usb speakers too. Or 3.5mm speakers since the headphone jack works. Either way, way less than $100 (especially for laptop quality). On the plus side, if the built in speakers never work, the computer won't make noise unless you've plugged in something which is a nice feature.
- random3 10mo agoIF $1900 is the bounty, it means it doesn't hurt enough. I remember going for the highest paying bounty in the Ethereum VM several years ago (I think it was ~$400 DAI/SAI). I did it because I wanted to force myself to learn the internals and to see for myself if the bounty system works. I think I spent a few weeks debugging and ended up splitting the bounty. As long as the user-facing issues are disconnected from the technical issues, it's going to be hard to get the true value.
- scotty79 10mo agoFunnily enough the sound doesn't work properly on Windows 10 on this laptop. In exactly same manner as on Linux. Did open source win again?
- userbinator 10mo agoIntel HDA was supposed to be a better standard than the AC'97 it was meant to replace. IMHO the blame lies solely on the codec makers for not working with the default settings (they can add additional functionality, but the base audio I/O should work with a generic HDA driver.)
- felipelalli 10mo agoMaybe related: - https://gist.github.com/felipelalli/6179aac72735fd35ea3a9854beb490e5 https://gist.github.com/felipelalli/6179aac72735fd35ea3a9854... - https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/issues/1039 https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-hardware/issues/1039
- shmerl 10mo agoI would stay away from anything that's using Nvidia, especially a laptop.
- herpderperator 10mo agoCan someone explain exactly what's happening here? https://github.com/nadimkobeissi/16iax10h-linux-sound-saga/issues/13 https://github.com/nadimkobeissi/16iax10h-linux-sound-saga/i... It seems like there's a lot of personal information being asked for / thrown around... including a debit/credit card number? Is there no better way to handle the bounty payment?
- worthless-trash 10mo agoMany of these firmware blobs are non redistributable, if you require this blob, you should grab it and back it up. I know a lot of firwmare can't be legally distributable in linux-firmware. Lenovo may not be as friendly as IBM to its opensource.
- devnull3 10mo agoThis has been an old problem with Legion laptops. All this will be available free of cost to everyone! Mad respect for people who are pledging their own money and the person who fixed it. Also, Lenovo Legion Pro 7* are not cheap (not that this would have been justified for cheap laptops). Shame on Lenovo/<big company> who should have fixed this years ago.
- jaakkonen 10mo agoIf there's some Lenovo EU rep with enough budget for their department, this person should really be contracted to fix the audio from their laptops one by one. This seemed to take 2 weeks with a dedicated person and remote access but debugging with access to the device could be much faster!
- jeroenhd 10mo agoThose two weeks probably would've been two days had the main developer been able to reboot and test the device directly. Outsourcing this work to outside developers on the regular probably would make the media claim something like "Lenovo is too lazy to pay their people to make their speakers work so they make strangers on the internet do it instead" which isn't half false. It'd probably be better and cheaper if they'd just hire someone to make their speakers work on Linux.
- m101 10mo agoI heard from a frontier coder at deepmind that Gemini, whilst not great at novel frontier coding, is actually pretty good at debugging. Wonder if someone is going to automate a bug bounty pipeline with AI tools.
- yeasku 10mo agoIf this ai coding things are so good why nobody is capitalizing on it? Why are they selling this studf to developers instead of taking contracts and making billions? Are they stupid or is just all a big lie?
- blablabla123 10mo agoWow... one solution is of course to deactivate these. Which is what I did for my Legion 5 Gen 10. Speakers don't seem to be much in use these days anyway. Still, I didn't expect this amount of custom configuration for my new laptop. Most importantly Bluetooth sound and getting Nvidia driver support. For Bluetooth I ended up writing my own tiny daemon. While driver support exists there seems to be a race condition somewhere between Pipewire, systemd and the bluetooth drivers. And for Nvidia drivers I ended up using the CUDA driver repository which is curiously only available for Debian 12.