[alsa-devel] How to report error in _pointer function?

[Timur Tabi]

Takashi Iwai wrote:

> So, the PCM status is properly changed to XRUN as expected.  From the
> driver perspective, everything must be fine.

I've been debugging aplay.  The main loop is function pcm_write().  It calls
writei_func() which returns -EPIPE.  This causes aplay to jump to xrun(), which
attempts to recover.

This is not what I want.  I don't want to return overrun/underrun.  I want to
return failure.  Returning XRUN is wrong.

Instead, I need to take a look at this code I have:

	snd_pcm_stream_lock_irqsave(substream, flags);

	if (snd_pcm_running(substream))
		snd_pcm_stop(substream, SNDRV_PCM_STATE_XRUN);

	snd_pcm_stream_unlock_irqrestore(substream, flags);

It's the call to snd_pcm_stop() that I don't like.  There doesn't appear to be a
SNDRV_PCM_STATE_xxx state that makes sense.  This function should eventually
bring me to snd_pcm_pre_stop().  But this function returns -EBADFD because the
current state is RUNNING and not OPEN.  Because it returns an error,
snd_pcm_do_stop() is never called.

This doesn't make any sense to me.  Why should I be able to stop a stream only
if it's open but not running?  If it's open, but not running, then there's
nothing to stop!  Can you explain the restriction in snd_pcm_pre_stop()?

-- 
Timur Tabi
Linux kernel developer at Freescale