[alsa-devel] [PATCH 0/5] PCM mmap (temporary) fixes for non-coherent architectures

[Takashi Iwai]

At Fri, 15 Jan 2010 17:50:49 +1100,
Benjamin Herrenschmidt wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 2010-01-15 at 07:43 +0100, Takashi Iwai wrote:
> > 
> > > It -might- be worth looking at adding code to the USB stack to
> > propagate
> > > the parent device dma_ops down to USB devices... hard to tell.
> > 
> > Or we may simply need to drop the mmap support on such
> > architectures...
> 
> Nah, that would suck since that includes x86 nowadays :-)

Ah, no, I meant about non-coherent architectures that can't use
vmalloc pages as the intermediate buffer.  Dropping mmap for x86 would
be a big regression ;)

> I think you probably need to separate the struct device * used for DMA
> (it could be default be the same as the "main" struct device tho or it
> could default to NULL which means no mmap support).
> 
> USB could (if not already) provide an accessor to obtain the HC's struct
> device for such mappings. We'll have to discuss that with Alan Stern I
> suppose.
> 
> The USB Audio or similar drivers could then use that accessors to fill
> up Alsa's dma_device field to replace the "default".

The situation of usb-audio is, unfortunately, a bit more complex
because the driver needs a continuous ring-buffer.  The packet data
are copied from that intermediate buffer on demand.

This isn't efficient, but the continuous ring-buffer is demanded by
the current API design exported as mmap.


thanks,

Takashi