I have a Framework Laptop 13 AMD with the 7840U CPU option running Arch Linux (I can attempt to reproduce the issues in a Fedora live session if need be) and I’m experiencing intermittent stuttering of HDMI audio.
It’s not happening all the time, but it does occur very frequently. The distance between audio-cut-offs varies between once or twice per second and once per tens of seconds.
I’m using PipeWire as my audio daemon.
I don’t see any logs about buffer Xruns in pipewire logs or any logs regarding HDMI audio or amdgpu driver logs in dmesg.
The issue appears to be similar to this issue someone is experiencing on a different device on a non-Framework device, so it could be a general AMDGPU HDMI Audio issue.
EDIT: It appears to only happen with one specific monitor. I will edit this once I have confirmed that it doesn’t occur with other devices.
Update: I have verified that the issue does not happen with this laptop + other monitors and does not happen with other devices and the above monitor. I will now try and reproduce the issue with multiple Linux kernel versions and/or different distros to rule out more cases.
The issue still persists, but I have uncovered a bit more details:
The issue exists on every kernel version I’ve tried (linux-lts 6.6.x, linux-stable 6.8-6.12 (and probably later)).
However, I finally found a workaround: The issue disappears or at least becomes unnoticable when I run echo high | sudo tee /sys/class/drm/card1/device/power_dpm_force_performance_level. Setting it to low consistently triggers the audio cuts once every few seconds and sometimes multiple times per second.
This tells me that something with the GPU clocks is affecting the audio that is piped through DP/HDMI.
EDIT: I just had a sudden power-off while running a GPU-heavy game with the above override turned on. The fans were not even running on full power. I’m not sure if I want to test the above workaround going forward given the sudden power-off.
EDIT2: GPU applications on the external screen also seem to lag in time with the audio stutters, but that might be subjective experience, I need to double-check this with an application that counts dropped frames.
Thank you for sharing all that information. I had a similar problem using an old LogiLink USB Sound Card playing a track to a multi speaker setup. After playing a track for ~1h in performance mode I had no issues apart from loud fan noises from time to time
More detail for future readers: I played two ~1h videos. It seemed like certain frequencies stuttered extremely, since it occurred on similar sounding parts of the tracks or happened exactly in the same way when repeating the problematic part. I suspected a problem with the sound system (connected via the LogiLink USB soundcard to the framework) , since my laptop speakers sounded fine. But after some testing, my internal speakers had (very rarely) the exactly same sounding distortions. I also use the battery saving mode a lot during simple playback. The video files also had a higher bitrade (around 40 Mbit/s) compared to e.g. my phone camera files (~ 8 Mbit/s).
I recently switched from the Intel gen 12 (where I had no issues) to the AMD 7840u. I use fedora 43, just swapped the boards from intel to amd without reinstalling the OS or doing any manual config. But this shouldn’t matter i guess… I’m happy for this workaround for now.
