I'm working on an ASoC driver, and I noticed that with OSS emulation enabled, my snd_pcm_ops.hw_params and and snd_pcm_ops.hw_free are called multiple times when an OSS driver uses the OSS emulation. In my case, .hw_params is called *four* times, each time with a different DMA buffer size and number of periods.
The problem is that my driver allocates a DMA buffer in my .hw_params function. For now, I have it deallocate the buffers at the top of the function and then allocate new ones based on the new hw_params values.
This is really annoying. So I have a few questions:
1) Is there any way this can be fixed? Can't the OSS emulation code figure out what it needs and wait until it's done before it calls .hw_params?
As a solution to the DMA buffer deallocate/reallocate hack I'm using, would it be okay to move the actual allocations to snd_pcm_ops.prepare()? My .hw_params function will collect the relevant data and keep them in some private structure. Then when .prepare() is called, I do the actual buffer allocation.
2) Can I assume that .prepare() is called only once?
3) Can I assume that .hw_params() is never called after .prepare() is called?