Librem 14 Microphone Killswitch not working? - Qubes OS

Hardware
1

I’ve recently installed Qubes OS on a Librem 14 and quickly noticed an issue with the microphone device kill switch. On the Librem 14 the microphone and camera kill switch are combined into one, and similarly the wifi and bluetooth kill switch are combined into one. I’ll be discussing the camera/mic switch.

When the switch is on, as I would expect the microphone and camera device both appear as available devices in Qubes and can be connected to my chosen VM. However when I flip the mic/camera kill switch, only the camera device disappears from my device list. The microphone device does not disappear from the device list and can still be attached to VMs.

Is this a misconfigured kill switch on the hardware level? A known Qubes bug of some kind?

2

microphone is part of sound card circuit.
in order to make it disappear , you would have to disable whole sound card.
kill switch disconnects microphone from sound chip.
sound card does not know if internal microphone is connected or not. so will not report back that fact.
however it will stop working ans no conductivity in circuit.
camera is separate device , so it can be switched off.

5 Likes
3

thank you for the excellent and fast response NineX