It's been an interesting 2026 in Linux development with [1]beginning to phase out i486 CPU support , [2]dropping ISDN and amateur "ham" radio support , and other code cleaning in the name of a diminishing user base -- or perhaps even no users left -- for those running such vintage hardware with a modern, up-to-date kernel. Yet ISA sound card drivers have seen an uptick in activity.

Last month was [3]this patch series improving the AMD InterWave ISA sound card driver . It ultimately got suspend and resume support going for InterWave ISA sound cards. That support was [4]merged for Linux 7.1 along with suspend and resume support for other old sound drivers including es1688, gusmax, and msnd drivers. For Linux 7.2 it's looking like even more ISA sound driver activity is coming to allow these 90's era sound cards to work with suspend and resume functionality on 2026+ kernels.

This week the Turtle Beach WaveFront ISA driver saw suspend and resume support queued up within the Linux sound subsystem's "for-next" Git branch. The Turtle Beach WaveFront hardware includes the Maui, Tropez, and Tropez Plus ISA sound cards. [5]This patch in the "for-next" sound branch until Linux 7.2 provides some rare love for the old TurtleBeach WaveFront hardware:

"The WaveFront driver still lacks support for suspend and resume in both the ISA and PnP driver tables.

Wire the driver into ALSA PM by storing the WSS codec pointer in the card private data and adding shared suspend/resume callbacks. Resume cannot simply rerun snd_wavefront_start(), because with the default fx_raw=1 setting that would reset the synth on every resume and discard uploaded WaveFront RAM contents.

Cache wavefront.os for PM, probe the ICS2115 after resume and only run the full reset/bootstrap path when the board comes back raw. When the firmware is still running, refresh the software slot bookkeeping and restore the MIDI routing state without forcing a synth reset.

Also quiesce and restart the WaveFront MIDI output timer across suspend and resume so active rawmidi output does not race the PM transition.

This restores the card to a usable baseline after resume while preserving uploaded samples and programs when the hardware state survives suspend. If the board resumes raw, userspace still needs to reload custom synth contents."

All of this recent ISA sound card driver activity continues to be carried out by a lone open-source developer, Cássio Gabriel.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Phasing-Out-i486

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Removes-Old-Net

[3] https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-InterWave-2026-Linux-

[4] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-7.1-Sound

[5] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tiwai/sound.git/commit/?h=for-next&id=ed060707d4bac8f1a2fcf83af4e1f01d3337893c