$1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

https://github.com/nadimkobeissi/16iax10h-linux-sound-saga

by rany_ • 8 months ago

295 128 8 months ago

github.com

andix• 8 months ago

I guess this here is what the title is describing: https://github.com/nadimkobeissi/16iax10h-linux-sound-saga/b...

jokowueu2• 8 months ago

Oh it's written by Nadim Kobeissi, such a huge fan of his work didn't expect him see him here

phoe-krk• 8 months ago

In 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.

jjmarr• 8 months ago

For those wondering:

Sincere thanks to everyone who pledged a reward for solving this problem. The reward goes to Lyapsus.

jokowueu2• 8 months ago

I didn't mean he wrote the fix but the read me instead, looking back at my comment people might have assumed that Nadim made the fix

amitav1• 8 months ago

Title should be: $2000 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovoe Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

AshamedCaptain• 8 months ago

I 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.

kgwxd• 8 months ago

The paperwork.

kykat• 8 months ago

I think that 2k is really really cheap for the expertise in kernel development

AlotOfReading• 8 months ago

It is, but it's amazing how cheap kernel expertise is relative to comparable experience in other specialties like frontend.

TZubiri• 8 months ago

But also lots of kernel developers work for free, so the average price of their work is very low

Gigachad• 8 months ago

People spam the most minimal viable patch to collect the bounty and move on. And these days they are sending an AI slop solution. It doesn’t promote good code like actually hiring someone.

layer83• 8 months ago

Given that “fixing this issue required weeks of intensive work from multiple people”, the price would have to be prohibitively high.

More generally, software is really, really expensive to produce and maintain. The economics only work at scale, in particular for B2C. (Maybe AI will change that, if it becomes more reliable.)

ffsm8• 8 months ago

Eh, I think you're underestimating some people perseverance.

You generally only need multiple people for timely action, and it usually even slows you down (from the perspective of total hours spent)

Like 2k bug bounty? I guarantee you some people would be willing to spend a lot of time for that. But yeah, people which are gainfully employed and have a decent salary - likely not.

TrainedMonkey• 8 months ago

For many large companies or even teams, there exists a class of bugs / issues / features where dropping 5-10k on a bounty is extremely cost efficient compared to working around the issue or internal development. That might not fund development outright, but at worst it would point out the features people want and serve to inform what to work on next. I think there are a couple reasons why that is not prevalent. Most important one is that highly compensated enterprise teams that would benefit the most from placing bounties tend to avoid software that is lacking features or has bugs. Secondary is not implemented here ego and general disconnect between people in the trenches that know what needs to be done and people controlling ability to place bounties.

Imagine FAANG assigning $500 per engineer per year to allocate to feature / bug bounties.

29athrowaway• 8 months ago

And also scarce skills.

wslh• 8 months ago

While you are completely correct about the bounty price, sometimes there are people who work deeply in the field and can solve those things relatively fast because they have already done similar things in the past.

1970-01-012• 8 months ago

Did you realize that you didn't include 'open source' in your statement? This is exactly what the desktop OS makers -Microsoft and Apple- do every single day. Their prices are mostly B2B and therefore hidden, but there is a steady income for each person involved in making the fix.

fragmede• 8 months ago

and yet, Microsoft Teams is a total trash fire full of bugs that users hate. So something is broken (Teams. It's Teams that is busted).

pm2153• 8 months ago

For small stuff, the cost is just going to be too much for people to want to pay it. This bug had a $1900 bounty attached. Let's put the cost of one software engineer (salary plus overheads) at $200,000 a year, which I think is an underestimate. That's $3850 a week, so unless your bug can definitely be fixed (including getting any necessary hardware, investigation, fixing, code review overhead, etc) in two or three days it doesn't pay. And if it could obviously be done in two days then it's likely somebody would have already done that.

The above back of envelope maths ignores the overheads of interacting with the people who posted the bounties to get them to agree to pay up, and of the cost overruns on the class of bugs that look like two day fixes but take two weeks.

jusssi• 8 months ago

$200k is one expensive software engineer. On average, you can get people to work for much less.

rowanG077• 8 months ago

$200k is on the extreme high-end of software engineers. For example in eastern europe $30k is normal. And that's not even the floor. You can go to india or africa to get even cheaper. The problem with this bug bounty though is that it requires pretty rare expertise. It's not a "throw any developer at it" type of thing.

mrbombastic2• 8 months ago

200k is a fairly high salaried software eng in expensive markets, a bounty program like this would be open worldwide and many people would be willing to work for a fraction of that, quality control is another concern but take a look at prices on sites like upwork and bids for this type of work and realize 200k is nowhere near the lower baseline.

amelius• 8 months ago

You are forgetting that typically many users want a bug fixed.

codedokode• 8 months ago

You don't need to hire American expensive, but not so productive, engineers, there are lot of other countries. Also, there are ML models.

tormeh• 8 months ago

Yeah, 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.

IshKebab• 8 months ago

I think the real issues are attributing work, and fear of doing a ton of work only to be pipped at the post.

Razengan• 8 months ago

I'd gladly pay a couple hundred to have Swift-like optionals in Godot's GDScript, among other things that are just a pain to convince all the random idiots on their official spaces of, but GitHub doesn't have a way to offer that :(

drunner• 8 months ago

I wish there was regulation that you have to sell and maintain a working product, so that open source devs don't have to waste their time fixing proprietary products.

nickff• 8 months ago

It looks like these laptops are usually sold with Windows; are you saying that every manufacturer should be obligated to develop drivers for every software which is theoretically compatible with it? Or are you just saying that we need even more caveats in the interminable EULAs we all just click through?

exabrial• 8 months ago

The problem is one-offs don't make steady, predictable, recurring revenue. Owning a consulting business is hard: you have to have customers waiting.

BobbyTables2• 8 months ago

Well, if one person spent a month on this, they’d be making about $10/hr.

Makes StarBucks barista pay look good…

Of course, if they can churn this out closer to 2 days, maybe there is something there.

Such a talented person would probably prefer a more certain and higher income.

sublinear• 8 months ago

I don't think this argument is accurate. There are other reasons to do this work even for free such as self-promotion, community-building, hobby, etc.

I think the real blockers are the legal implications of reverse engineering.

qingcharles• 8 months ago

For a lot of people in the world $10/hr is a fantastic wage. And you get to work at your own pace, probably from home.

tiagod• 8 months ago

Sort of unrelated, but I've been thinking a lot of founding a non-profit that fund raises just to undercut the usual shitty consultancy companies that build government websites and apps just to build them properly.

thombles• 8 months ago

Out of all bugs and feature requests, this one is an outlier in that it requires specific hardware to work on and has an obvious success condition. This means that every man and his dog is not going to be throwing an LLM at this to see if their particular slop wins the prize. People get weird when money is on the line and managing a bounty is a job for which I would never volunteer.

jijijijij• 8 months ago

Since you are talking about proprietary software, I assume you mean fixing bugs by the corpo devs themselves.

Well, this would imply broken software. You already payed for the software, now you are required to pay to get bugs fixed? Bad optics, although not beyond contemporary sentiments... Inherently shady incentives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive

This kinda only works best for FOSS, incentivizing external devs IMO.

ValdikSS• 8 months ago

There is some—VueScan for example, where the developer reverse-engineer scanning protocols, re-implement and sell it.

jey• 8 months ago

And the person who did the implementation, Lyapsus, did it without access to the hardware?? https://github.com/nadimkobeissi/16iax10h-linux-sound-saga/i...

Nition• 8 months ago

That 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!

skylurk• 8 months ago

I just read it too and now I think I know what the suspense novels robots write for each other will be like.

opello• 8 months ago

I also enjoyed reading through it, but wish I'd seen this comment first and avoided missing out on the moment of success too. :)

jmakov• 8 months ago

Where are LLMs now?

akatsutki• 8 months ago

They're not useful for fixing things like this. Only frontend React.js

hackyhacky• 8 months ago

Only frontend React.js

Good suggestion, but I discovered that React was not able to fix my Linux kernel, either, for some reason.

khannn• 8 months ago

Vibe 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• 8 months ago

You're wrong:

https://words.filippo.io/claude-debugging/

https://dmitrybrant.com/2025/09/07/using-claude-code-to-mode...

jauntywundrkind2• 8 months ago

if there were data sheets available I expect they actually could do a bunch of the work here.

yeasku4• 8 months ago

There are...

yeasku4• 8 months ago

Where you at Claude?

1970-01-012• 8 months ago

Patching up the kernel to get some sound coming out of the speakers.. Very on brand for Linux.

oasisaimlessly• 8 months ago

How do you know somebody has no idea what they're talking about? They'll tell you.

transcriptase• 8 months ago

Show us on the doll where they’re wrong.

balamatom• 8 months ago

deep

AnotherGoodName4• 8 months ago

I agree. I can’t see any reason this couldn’t be packaged as a prebuilt kernel module so end users can trivially install it. The instructions and code here can be used to build the kernel module.

I don’t have this laptop but have built kernel modules in the past to give context. It’s a tiny step to publish this as a kernel module so end users can trivially install this (this reduces the instructions to downloading one file, running one command, with no reboot or rebuild needed) so it’s quite reasonable to call this out and ask someone to do it.

It’s a bit like publishing a windows driver as raw source code. Great work but there’s no reason not to ship the prebuilt driver right?

zozbot2343• 8 months ago

Some device classes can be supported in userspace because no matter how an adversarial driver might get the device to misbehave, it cannot possibly break the kernel's security model. This might even apply to some audio devices, depending on how exactly they're hooked up to the rest of your system. But the more typical devices, especially those in your average SoC and those connected to a PCIe bus or the like, have full privileges within the system and will need kernel-level support for the foreseeable future.

trelane• 8 months ago

I can’t see any reason this couldn’t be packaged as a prebuilt kernel module so end users can trivially install it.

I don't think you have to be the original developer to create packages one can distribute. Go for it!

From TFA:

This guide is currently for Linux kernel version 6.17.8. It will be updated for future kernel versions as they are released, until the fix is fully integrated into the kernel.

So it sounds like the plan is to get it into the mainline kernel, at which point it will get to all the distributions. So I sent see the problem here.

npteljes• 8 months ago

That's how it works in Linux land for two reasons. One, drivers live in the kernel (roughly). Two, Linux is aftermarket for many hardware, in which cases there's hardware first, then the support.

iamcreasy• 8 months ago

Here 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

jauntywundrkind2• 8 months ago

Interestingly 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

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• 8 months ago

If only people would do these bounties for ITE sensor hubs.

espdev2• 8 months ago

There 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. :)

toast02• 8 months ago

$100 gets you a usb sound card and $90 for something else. It's not a good solution, but it's easy.

espdev2• 8 months ago

The 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.

random3• 8 months ago

IF $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• 8 months ago

Funnily 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• 8 months ago

Intel 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• 8 months ago

shmerl• 8 months ago

I would stay away from anything that's using Nvidia, especially a laptop.

herpderperator• 8 months ago

Can someone explain exactly what's happening here? 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-trash2• 8 months ago

Many 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• 8 months ago

This 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• 8 months ago

If 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• 8 months ago

Those 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• 8 months ago

I 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.

yeasku4• 8 months ago

If 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• 8 months ago

Wow... 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.

$1900 Bug Bounty to Fix the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 16IAX10H's Speakers on Linux

Related Stories