I have been suffering with an annoying soundcard hardware issue for some time. I submitted a bug that apparently impacted others, and on my quest to find a solution realized that the problem might be chipset related, and not limited to just my laptop or distribution. Searching the Ubuntu bug tracker (launchpad), there are five separate bug logs for the same hardware (differing laptops). From my research this appears to be a kernel regression issue, as the chipset functioned with kernal 4.19.9 with a kernel patch, and hasn't functioned since. My guess is since this is a kernel issue it is outside the scope of Ubuntu support, but maybe Ubuntu developers contribute back and it isn't outside the scope.

Does anyone know how bugs are handled in this scenario? Are separate development efforts happening for each of the bugs, or is there a consolidated effort across distributions because of the hardware nature of the bug?

Any insight will be greatly appreciated.