Re: [alsa-devel] [Device-drivers-devel] [PATCH] Add driver for AnalogDevices ADAU1701 SigmaDSP

[Cliff Cai]

On Wed, Mar 9, 2011 at 2:08 PM, Mike Frysinger <vapier.adi@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 10:55, Mark Brown wrote:
>> On Mon, Mar 07, 2011 at 10:33:25AM -0500, Mike Frysinger wrote:
>>> On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 09:59, Mark Brown wrote:
>>> > I'd expect that the driver would at least error out if the user tried to
>>> > do the wrong thing here, like I say currently the firmware code is just
>>> > not joined up with anything else at all.
>>
>>> i dont see how the driver can detect a "wrong" thing.  the driver has
>>> no idea what arbitrary code the user is going to load and what that
>>> code is going to do, or validate the code in any way.  this is why the
>>> firmware has a small crc header on it -- we only make sure that what
>>> the user compiled at build time matches what is loaded into the
>>> hardware.
>>
>> At a bare minimum suddenly stopping and starting the firmware while
>> audio is going through it is unlikely to work well (you'd most likely
>> get a hard stop of the audio followed by a sudden hard start which sound
>> very unpleasant to listeners) and so should be prevented.  There's a
>> bunch of options for doing this (including refusing to change, ensuring
>> the DSP output is muted during the change or routing around the DSP
>> while doing the change).
>
> you would probably get the "normal" clicks and pops, but i guess your
> view of "wrong" is much more strict than mine ;).  i'm not sure our
> parts allow routing around the DSP (Cliff would have to comment).  as
> for the rest, i think it'd be best to let the user space app dictate
> how they want to handle things.  perhaps clicks/pops are fine with
> them.  or they arent, and so the userspace app would make sure to
> pause/mute/whatever the stream.  either way, this sounds like a policy
> that shouldnt be hard coded in the codec driver.

again,this part is a DSP itself not an audio codec like adau1761 whose DSP
core can be bypassed.

>>> > systems) there's no reason they shouldn't be able to rely on standard
>>> > tools for managing their audio configurations.
>>
>>> if the standard tools existed today, i'd of course agree.  but as you
>>> indicated there's nothing right now for us to bug off of.  so how
>>> userspace "probes" for existing data would be however the end user
>>> chooses to manage things.  it's not like the standard tools could
>>> really provide anything other than a simple string that indicates
>>> "some blob exists with name xxx".  the meaning/metadata that surrounds
>>> xxx isnt really relevant from the kernel's pov.
>>
>> The standard tools should also be able to manage the mechanics of
>> actually getting the new data into the kernel at appropriate moments.
>> This includes both offering control via UIs such as alsamixer and being
>> able to include configuration of the data in UCM configurations.
>
> exposing this via alsamixer and friends would be a useful debugging
> tool so people can toy around with known working configurations.  and
> have code examples to see how to do it.
>
>>> > At present userspace can enumerate and change the runtime configuration
>>> > the system offers via the ALSA APIs (and this will get even better once
>>> > the media controller API starts being used).  This means that you can
>>> > fairly easily write a userspace that'll run on pretty much any Linux
>>> > audio hardware, adapting with pure configuration for which you can
>>> > provide point and click tuning (realistically by allowing the user to
>>> > configure via standard ALSA tools and offering a "save as use case" type
>>> > interface).  If we start adding backdoors to drivers we're taking a step
>>> > back from where we are currently by requiring that the application layer
>>> > know magic stuff about individual systems in order to work with them.
>>
>>> from how we've seen people using these codecs, this scenario doesnt
>>> make much sense.  the different algorithms would be loaded on the fly
>>> by the application and its current operating needs, not a single
>>> algorithm selected by the ender user that wouldnt change for the life
>>> of the app.  not saying the scenario would never come up, just that it
>>> isnt the one we'd be focused on.
>>
>> I'm not sure you're following what's being said here.  The above control
>> discussed above full system configuration of all the control offered by
>> the system, not tuning the parameters of an individual algorithm.  This
>> includes volume controls, routing controls, algorithms, coefficients and
>> anything else that can be changed.  A scenario where you want to change
>> the set of algorithms the hardware can support is certainly included in
>> that.
>
> i just meant that the use cases we've been dealing with involve the
> people developing the application taking care of picking which
> firmwares to load at any particular time.  having the end user (the
> guy who buys the actual device) select firmwares doesnt make much
> sense.  but this particular qualification probably is irrelevant to
> the framework you're proposing in the end.
> -mike
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