Comment 7 for bug 1186879

Po-Hsu Lin, the requirement for radeon.audio=1 on all AMD cards has been so since:
Author: Alex Deucher <email address hidden> 2011-06-06 16:39:16
Committer: Dave Airlie <email address hidden> 2011-06-08 05:14:41
Parent: 62fff811d73095bd95579d72f558f03c78f7914a (drm/radeon/kms: fix for radeon on systems >4GB without hardware iommu)
Child: 18367c0ec73671fbfea35f13ae52d39437c53eb5 (Merge branch 'drm-radeon-urgent' of git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/airlied/drm-2.6)
Branches: master, remotes/origin/master
Follows: v3.0-rc2
Precedes: v3.0-rc3

    drm/radeon/kms: disable hdmi audio by default

    The current RE'd code causes blank screens and
    display problems on a lot of systems. So disable
    it by default for now. It can still be enabled
    by setting the audio parameter to 1. E.g.:
    radeon.audio=1

    Fixes:
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38010
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27731
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=35970
    https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=26195
    and many other reported problems.

    Signed-off-by: Alex Deucher <email address hidden>
    Signed-off-by: Dave Airlie <email address hidden>

I'm not aware of an initiative to quirk on a per hardware basis enabling hdmi audio by default. It seems this was preventative as too many collateral damage reports were being filed with it enabled. The WORKAROUND is now explicitly documented in https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonDriver .

Given this, what would you like the end game for this report to be?