Why doesn't the mic disappear from audio devices when flipping the hardware switch?

[MJ1]

@fw13amd

Which begs the question: why isn’t the hardware switch shutting down the device entirely?

I see it among my audio devices, unmuted, with a reasonable volume set, so I’m inclined to think everything should work.

Is this something that could be worked on, on the kernel side? Or is the switch just “covering” the mic in order to only capture a constant white noise, instead of cutting power entirely?

It might be difficult or creates more problems than it solves to remove the audio input entirely.

At least for the video portion of the camera, Framework changed it specifically to not fully disconnect the camera. Mentioning that it improves how apps behave. Similar or worse app handling issues might present if the audio input was removed entirely.

@Destroya

The privacy switch behavior on the camera also uses a new mode where instead of powering off the full camera, it cuts off the image sensor power and generates a placeholder blank image in the camera controller. This results in better behavior in applications and faster privacy mode switching.