[alsa-devel] How does usbaudio synchronize on playback?

[Clemens Ladisch]

John Crowley wrote:
> [...]
> What I don't understand is how does prepare_playback_urb ensure that more
> playback data has actually been written into the buffer?

It doesn't; the ALSA framework does.

When the driver calls snd_pcm_period_elapsed(), ALSA calls the .pointer
callback and checks if an underrun has happened.  Underrun detection
works this way because most sound card hardware reads the data out of
the buffer asynchronously.

> The problem is that we are getting erroneous data, and suspect that it is
> caused by this synchronization issue. When the initial no-data URBs are
> completed, the prepare_playback_urb logic copies a lot of data from the
> buffer into new URBs

The initial URBs should complete one by one, not all at once (this is
the only reason why the driver uses these initial URBs in the first
place).

> but apparently no playback data has been written into the buffer yet
> by the application.

This should result in an underrun and the stream being stopped, except
if your application has disabled this behaviour.


Best regards,
Clemens

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