Re: [RFC] Moving snd-bt87x and btaudio to drivers/media

[Takashi Iwai]

At Wed, 18 Jan 2006 11:29:28 -0200,
Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> 
> Lee/Andrew/Linus/Takashi and others,
> 
> 	Currently, we have some audio modules for multimedia devices under
> drivers/media and others under sound. They also appear under different
> points at Kconfig menus. 
> 
> 	So, for BTTV support, current structure at linus -git is (from Kconfig
> perspective):
> 
> 	Sound/ALSA/PCI Devices/Bt87x Audio capture
> 		sound/snd-bt87x.ko - ALSA audio for bttv boards
> 	Sound/OSS/TV Card (bt848) mixer support
> 		drivers/media/video/tvmixer.ko
> 
> 	Multimedia/V4L/BT848 V4L
> 		drivers/media/video/bttv.ko
> 	Multimedia/V4L/BT848 V4L/DVB-ATSC support
> 		drivers/media/dvb/bt8xx/bt878.ko
> 		drivers/media/dvb/bt8xx/dvb-bt8xx.o
> 
> 	This I couldn't found at any Kconfig (but module exists, and also an
> entry at Makefile):
> sound/oss/Makefile:obj-$(CONFIG_SOUND_BT878)    += btaudio.o
> 
> 	For SAA7134 and CX88, all are under Multimedia/V4L. All
> OSS/ALSA/DVB/MPEG options are under the driver name.
> 
> 	IMHO, from users perspective, it makes much more sense if all BTTV
> moules (even sound ones) being under bttv video driver. Current module
> allows using audio driver without video, but this doesn't make sense,
> since audio will be only available, in practice, after selecting a
> video/audio input or tuning a channel. These functionalities are
> provided by bttv. So, we could even disable audio modules if bttv were
> not compiled.
> 
> 	Also, bug 5995 showed a problem when user have a bttv card and dvb is
> also probed. dvb also handles audio, so, currently, it is mutually
> exclusive with snd-bt87x audio.
> 
> 	So, my proposal is to move sound/snd-bt87x.ko to drivers/media, moving
> also its menu, and moving tvmixer menu also. After it, should move some
> related code at bttv dvb modules, to reduce or eliminate mutually
> exclusiveness between the two. 
> 
> 	We might keep supporting btaudio, but I think this is already obsoleted
> by alsa one, so, IMHO, we can just drop it. We intend to do the same
> with saa7134-oss after some time (kernel 2.6.15 is the first with this
> module, so we may remove it on 2.6.18 to give some time for testing).

Which directory do you suppose exactly?  drivers/media/tv (or
something like that), or existing one like drivers/media/video?

I personally have no big objection to move snd-bt87x location.
although the external alsa-driver tarball would require a tune.
It was there simply because the driver is basically independent from
other layers but sound.  From the functionality viewpoint, it's better
to gather all modules, of course.

One point I'm conerned is, however, the order of objects in the
built-in kernel.  Recently we had a problem of initializations of
saa7134-alsa and sound core stuff.  We should be careful about that.

Also, more intutive Kconfig would be nice to have.  For example, it'd
be better to use a choice type for saa7134-alsa and -oss drivers.
Also, to my eyes, it's better to select CONFIG_SND from saa7134-alsa
instead of depending on it.


Takashi
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