[alsa-devel] getting HDAudio IDs

[Takashi Iwai]

At Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:09:19 -0600,
Scott Serr wrote:
> 
> Hi All,
> 
> I've found a great way to get HDAudio vendor/device IDs when audio 
> drivers are loaded: /proc/asound/card?/codec?
> 
> But to remake my particular (barebones) distro with with audio support, 
> it will be repetitive and time consuming.  I'm wondering what would be 
> involved in making a user space utility that would return the HDAudio ID?
> 
> A guy on #alsa came up with some good ideas.  Potentially following the 
> lead of others directly accessing the hardware from user space 
> http://samba.org/picturebook/ but using libpci instead.  Maybe we can 
> use "single cmd mode" so we don't need interrupts.
> 
> My original idea:
> It might be that a smart developer could grab a bunch of alsa/hdaudio 
> driver source and torture it into userland.... just to get these IDs.
> 
> Should I quit now?  Is it doable?  Are there people here with the 
> skills/experience to do this?

I don't think this worth to go.  Clearly this is a job of the kernel
to communicate with such a hardware.  The question is rather how to
generalize the communication.

One idea is to split the current driver into a generic HD-audio bus
driver, controller driver and codec drivers.  In that way, you'll get
a safer access.  But this would be a major rewrite, and no trivial
task, although it's a good and clean direction to go.


thanks,

Takashi