[alsa-devel] soc-dsp questions

[Mark Brown]

On Thu, Jun 09, 2011 at 11:58:23PM -0700, Patrick Lai wrote:
> On 4/26/2011 3:18 AM, Mark Brown wrote:

> >This is roughly the same thing I've been talking about for digital DAPM
> >links.  I've got code which runs at the minute but the implementation
> >sucks too much, should be able to pull out some of the preparation work
> >in the next day or so.

> Is it possible I can take an early glimpse of implementation? I do have

No, the code ended up colliding with something someone else had done and
wasn't worth saving so I just threw it away.  However I did get the
external interface upstream before I did that - that was the code to
support not providing a platform driver for a DAI.  What the code did
was to look to see if there was a platform driver and if there wasn't
it'd add some DAPM nodes and links which would bring up the DAI with no
userspace involvement.

> use cases that PCM is exchanged between two back-ends. Right now, I
> need to define DUMMY hostless front-end DAI links to bring up the
> back-ends. Another query is how hardware parameters is passed to
> back-end with your design? Not able to choose back-end channel mode

For the initial code they were just inferred from the capabilities of
the DAI - all the cases I'm interested in are for interoperation with
something that's fixed format at one end of the link so I could punt on
that issue.  I'd thought about allowing the dai_link to have a set of
hw_params settings stored in it which the user would be given an
enumeration to select from but hadn't actually done anything concrete
with it.

> independent of front-end channel mode is a big problem especially if
> channel mode is more than stereo. DSP is handles upmixing/downmixing
> happens in our design. Right now, we force channel mode to stereo. So,
> for the scenario which we just want mono input, we have codec
> configured to pick up single mic input to both left and right channel.
> DSP takes average of two channels into mono stream. Once we need to
> support > 2 channel recording, it's wasteful to go with the same
> approach if all we want is mono input. Did we talk about this topic

That might be handlable by either of the methods I was suggesting above.
Of course depending on the algorithms you're running the DSP may want
more mics than it's producing output channels - beam forming or noise
cancellation are the obvious examples there.

> during workshop? Why is my problem also a concern on OMAP4/ABE?

Do you mean not also a concern?  I *believe* OMAP is passing the
configuration through to the external DAI using the front end/back end
connection so the format gets selected by the app when it does a record,
possibly with rewriting through the hook functions in the machine driver.