[alsa-devel] Missing 4-channel support on older NVIDIA MCP HW

[Stephen Warren]

Takashi Iwai wrote:
> 
> At Mon, 30 Aug 2010 10:11:09 -0700,
> Stephen Warren wrote:
> >
> > It looks like even though some NVIDIA MCPs have min/max channel of 2/8, not
> > all HW supports the intermediate # channels (4 and 6) over HDMI. Various
> > combinations are supported on various HW: 2, 2/8, 2/6/8, 2/4/6/8.
> >
> > At present, when an application uses an unsupported number of channels,
> > playback appears to operate correctly, but the HW doesn't actually send the
> > audio data over HDMI.
> >
> > Is it possible for patch_nvhdmi.c to simply program codec the HW in 8-channel
> > mode even though the controller is only sending 4-/6-channel data?
> 
> I'm not sure whether HD-audio codec can have a /dev/zero-kind of stream.
> It's possible to set up but I don't think it's worth.
> It'd be far easier to omit 4 and 6-channels for such a case.
> 
> > I'm not
> > sure if this would cause the codec to get out of sync with the controller's
> > data stream. Would the controller end up grabbing 8 channels worth of data
> > from the stream at a time, have no way to synchronize to the start of each
> > sample, and hence end up packing e.g. 2 complete 4 channel samples into a
> > single 8 channel sample?
> >
> > If not, it seems that patch_nvhdmi.c should be modified so that each codec's
> > _open() function returns an error for unsupported rates. I can code that up
> > if we need.
> 
> Do you mean for unsupported channels?

Oops, yes.

Do you think that's the correct fix?

If the driver errors out the open, will a plug: (or other non hw:) ALSA device
dynamically "upsample" a 4-channel stream to the next supported (8-channel), or
will the user application have to handle this?

> > Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's possible for applications to query
> > this information from ALSA, since a hw_params_t exposes just a min/max
> > channel count rather than a mask.
> 
> It can be also masked.

Are you saying the APIs already support a mask for channel count, and I just
didn't find it, or that the APIUs should be updated to report a mask?

Thanks.

-- 
nvpublic