[alsa-devel] [PATCH - alsa-lib 2/3] tlv: Handle 'holes' in SND_CTL_TLVT_DB_RANGE array

[Mark Brown]

On Mon, Jul 19, 2010 at 06:11:30PM +0200, Takashi Iwai wrote:

> Well, one remaining question is how to handle if the hardware has
> really no value in a certain range (a hole).  Fixing in alsa-lib is a
> sort of workaround, but it doesn't sound right, especially if the
> range info can be provided correctly in the source.

I guess it depends on what you're thinking of for an inexact match - if
we're doing inexact matches within the range we're already saying that
we're not giving 100% accuracy (and remember that some hardware has very
coarse control).  It seems wrong that we'd fail to match with a slighy
inaccuracy when the requested value happens to be just outside the range
but accept any old accuracy level from coarse grained steps.

> If kernel changes would become too messy, then yes, we can reconsider
> fixing this only in alsa-lib, though.

Personally I'd rather the kernel just provided a mapping between control
values and dB scales and then the application layer can decide what it
thinks an appropriate match is.  Decisions about how accurate a match is
needed seem very policy like and therefore userspaceish and it seems
wrong to be coding the data tables in the kernel in a way that works
around the particular match algorithm in the application layer.