Describe the bug
All pulseaudio sound output stutters until any alsa utility or plugin is used with -Dhw:.... The stream sounds 50% interlaced with null at ~10hz. The stutter is corrected for any pulseaudio output that starts after any use of alsa (aplay, arec, audacity plugins...) with -Dhw: exits.

The stutter is present if and only if SND_SOC_SOF_DEBUG_ENABLE_FIRMWARE_TRACE=n in the kernel, which makes debugging interesting. This could also be a driver bug.

To Reproduce

pulseaudio --start
pacat </dev/urandom #(or anything)

Reproduction Rate
100%

Expected behavior
Clear audio output

Impact
Very annoying with only pulseaudio, irrelevant on alsa.

Environment
All FW, tplg, and kernel modules built-in.

1. Branch name and commit hash of the 2 repositories: sof (firmware/topology) and linux (kernel driver).
   • Kernel: torvalds/linux@22fbc03, sof-dev (thesofproject/linux@53b27a2), sof-dev-rebase (thesofproject/linux@ecda593)
   • SOF: 1.5.1 (88707ca), master (878f15b)
2. Name of the topology file
   • Topology: sof-bdw-rt5677.tplg
3. Name of the platform(s) on which the bug is observed.
   • Platform: bdw-rt5677

Screenshots or console output
All logs are identical, with the exception of FW logs, which cannot be produced (see above).

Pragmatic note: bdw-rt5677 is a rare platform, and the workaround of setting SND_SOC_SOF_DEBUG_ENABLE_FIRMWARE_TRACE=y is very easy, so this may not deserve any kind of priority.