On 03/07/2014 05:53 PM, Maxime Ripard wrote:
Hi Liam, Mark,
I have a sound IP that is part of an SoC that I'm willing to write a driver for.
Which SoC is this?
This IP is made of a few registers to control the sampling rate, if we're using mono/stereo, plus two fifos, one for playback, one for capture, that can be seed with data. The data are then taken, go through a DAC, and the outer interface of the IP are directly analog signals (so the DAC/ADC are directly in the SoC, and the only interface we have is plain registers).
From what I understood from ASoC, you have mostly three components, the DAI, the codec and the platform that plumbers the two first together. Here, my understanding is that it's pretty much the whole three in a single IP.
The platform component usually takes care of transferring data from memory to your IP. It sounds as if this is still separate on your platform. Quite possibly you can use the generic dmaengine PCM driver. Right now ASoC expects you to specify a DAI link for a PCM device. The DAI link connects the DAIs of two components typically the SoC side and a external CODEC. In your case you do not have the external CODEC. You can solve this by using a dummy CODEC or splitting things up and register both the CODEC and the CPU DAI from the same driver.
But I'm currently working on a patchset that will eventually allow these kind of devices to be supported more naturally. It will allow to register them as one component that won't need the CODEC component to work.
Should such a hardware block be handled into ASoC, and if yes, how? If not, which other framework should be used?
It makes sense to use ASoC if there are components where the driver can be shared e.g. the DMA in your case. Otherwise you can also use plain old ALSA.
- Lars