Thirty-one years after Creative Technology introduced the Sound Blaster AWE32 ISA-based sound card, the open-source driver support within the Linux kernel continues to be worked on… Submitted today for Linux 6.16 is fixing support for this once mighty ISA sound card from the mid 90’s.
Catching me by surprise a few minutes ago when looking at this week’s sound fixes pull request ahead of the Linux 6.16-rc3 release was:
“Fixes for legendary SoundBlaster AWE32 ISA device (a real one, we still got a bug report after 25 years)”
The fixes set to be merged today for Linux 6.16 Git are for the SoundBlaster “SB” ISA driver and include force to disable DMAs when DMA mode is changed and not allow changing the DMA mode during operations.
These two SoundBlaster ISA driver fixes are to address Bug 218185 – ISA soundcard SoundBlaster AWE32 snd-sbawe.ko freezes the system with pipewire/wireplumber. This bug report is actually from late 2023 but only now being fixed now in mid-2025 with Linux 6.16 and then potentially back-ported to stable kernel series.
Someone at least in 2023 was working to run Fedora 39 on a Pentium P54C system with 1GB of RAM and sporting the Creative SoundBlaster AWE32 sound card. But with the modern PipeWire/WirePlumber sound stack, the entire system would freeze due to the snb-sbawe kernel driver.
Now with these patches coming to the Linux kernel, the Creative SoundBlaster AWE32 ISA sound card can work on modern Linux desktops if you so choose without the system freezing. Then again, running any modern Linux desktop with PipeWire and friends is likely to be rather sluggish on any ISA-equipped aging PC.
