A motivated Lenovo Legion Pro 7 (16IAX10H) owner has successfully gotten their system’s speaker issues fixed after setting up a bug bounty program on GitHub. Nadim Kobeissi, a Linux user, was fed up with the gaming laptop’s “tinny and muffled” speaker output and suspected an issue with the Realtek codec on the open-source OS. Kobeissi posted the project in October with $500 of their own money, and five others pledged their own funds, bringing the total to $2,000. Now the issue has been solved, and the fixer is getting $2,000 from the community that developed around this rallying call.
Bug bounties have proved to be a worthwhile avenue for even the biggest developers to explore – Apple, Google, and Microsoft are among the big-dollar program organizers. In this instance, it is interesting to see this level pulled on a much smaller scale, but for a quick and successful fix.
Kobeissi fired up support for this GitHub-based bug bounty program, which kicked off in October. “We are a bunch of Linux users with the Lenovo Legion Pro 7 (16IAX10H) and we are sick and tired of our speakers not working properly,” the frustrated Legion user wrote. They added that they “also suck at writing Linux kernel audio drivers,” before promising “we will send you a lot of money,” for a fix.
You can see, above, that the Kobeissi ended up being the second-biggest contributor (money wise) to this bug bounty program. It ended up raising a nice, neat $2,000 for the solution finder.
Kobeissi also did their best to help any potential fixer, with a few educated guesses about the source of the Legion Pro 7’s speaker audio annoyances. Chief suspect was the incorrect detection of the Realtek ALC3306 codec. But there was also an issue with “no integration between the codec and the amplifiers in the audio pipeline,” in this laptop, which sports both Tweeters and Woofers.
The bounty-fix is for everyone!
The fix for this audio issue was posted on GitHub just a couple of days ago, indicating the time from the beginning of the bug bounty program to a solution was approximately a month. Kobeissi provides a step-by-step guide here, which affected users can follow.
This guide works for Linux kernel version 6.17.8. Moreover, the guide will get updates for future kernel versions “until the fix is fully integrated into the kernel,” notes the bug bounty organizer. If when you follow the fix process, “Your audio should now work correctly and permanently. This fix will persist across reboots with no additional steps required,” says Kobeissi.
Developer Yakov Till, AKA Lepsus, is largely credited with the fix (for “95% of the engineering work”). They get the monetary reward and heartfelt thanks of those who pledged to support the bug bounty.
We conclude by pondering whether this kind of private bug bounty, organized to eliminate computing annoyances, could set a trend.
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