I have just gone through the procedure of upgrading my ALSA for a 12.3 install. This was triggered by trying to get the sound card to behave properly.
Driver was snd-hda-intel running on a fujitsu machine and the problem was that sound always came from the internal speakers regardless of whether headphones were plugged in or not.
Having exhausted all the module variations of “model”, “enable_msi” etc, I finally hit upon the idea that maybe my ALSA needed something.
Having gone through the procedure detailed in “SDB:Alsa-update”, I arrived at installing the kernel part and got lots of warnings concerning version disagreements. Nevertheless, the upgrades had the desired affect and the sound card is fine now.
My main issue is, however, why aren’t the updates for the ALSA stack published via the normal online update mechanism? I spent a lot of time and effort prior to the ALSA upgrade because I had assumed that I was up to date only to find that I was 2 or 3 versions behind.