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Apple Driver Audio
Upstream status: partial. Pre-T2 machines are plain HDA and work. T2 machines route audio through the T2 and are an open bring-up target.
Every Intel Mac before 2018 uses Intel HDA with a Cirrus Logic codec (CS4206, CS4208 family) or occasionally Realtek. snd_hda(4) drives them.
| What | Status |
|---|---|
| Internal speakers | works, may need pin patching on some models |
| Headphone jack + sense | works |
| Internal microphone | works on most, verify per model |
| HDMI / DisplayPort audio | via GPU HDA function, needs drm-kmod loaded |
| Optical out (older minis/iMacs) | works where present |
Per-model hint.hdaa pin reconfigurations are classic FreeBSD wiki
content; collect them during model testing with sysctl dev.hdaa dumps.
The speakers and mic hang off the T2, reached over the apple_bce transport (see Apple-Driver-T2). Linux drives them with a dedicated codec driver on top of its BCE audio queues. With apple_bce now upstream, the audio queue protocol is the missing piece on FreeBSD. Headphone output state on T2 also involves the SMC jack sense. Currently: no sound, honest status.
cat /dev/sndstat- speaker-test each output pin, note the hdaa nid mapping
- record from the internal mic
- HDMI audio with drm-kmod loaded
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