[alsa-devel] Query on Audio DMA using DMAEngine

[Joel Fernandes]

On 06/30/2013 07:06 AM, Lars-Peter Clausen wrote:
> Added alsa-devel to Cc.
> 
> On 06/28/2013 05:27 AM, Fernandes, Joel wrote:
>> Hi Lars,
>>
>> Hope you are doing well.
>>
>> I am implementing Cyclic DMA support in the EDMA driver that is used by Davinci and now newer TI SoCs.
>> I am thinking once I am done I can plug it into the snd_dmaengine framework.
>>
>> Currently however, the davinci-pcm code directly programs the EDMA. That is what I am working to replace with a single driver and adapt to the snd dmaengine framework. However, once the current code in davinci-pcm uses internal RAM as an intermediate step in the whole DMA process (First data is TX to IRAM from DRAM and then from DRAM to the audio device).
>>
>> Do you have any ideas on how we can adapt to the framework, such that we can till use the IRAM? Are there any existing implementations out there that do something similar?
> 
> Hm, I guess using the snd_dmaengine_pcm helper functions here shouldn't be too
> hard. Using the generic snd_dmaengine_pcm driver will require some extensions
> to it though. The mmp platform (pxa/mmp-pcm.c) is also using some kind of
> on-chip memory, so having support for this in the generic driver certainly

I quickly looked at the implementation there. That's neat the way IRAM is used
to allocate the DMA buffer.

> makes sense. For the chaining you'd probably have to extend the dmaengine
> framework, since this kind of interleaved mem-to-mem and mem-to-dev cyclic
> transfer is currently not possible.

I was thinking , if it makes sense to make this kind of intermediate IRAM step
purely a DMA controller driver specific implementation. Basically, what I mean
is the use of IRAM will be unknown to any of the other DMA layers and purely
implement in the DMA controller driver making the interleaving with IRAM
transparent to the DMAEngine framework or the other drivers. Using device tree
or some other method, one could indicate that IRAM is present and should be used
for the specific DMA channel.

> I'm wondering though why do you need to copy the data to RAM first, is it not
> possible to map the IRAM to userspace?

Yes, certainly it should be possible to map the IRAM directly. I don't know the
exact reasons why it was done that way but I do know not using the IRAM was
causing under runs. I will run some experiments mapping IRAM directly to see if
we still see under runs.

Thanks,

-Joel