On Wed, Aug 30, 2017 at 9:20 PM, Pierre-Louis Bossart pierre-louis.bossart@linux.intel.com wrote:
The firmware available upstream does not contain MP3/AAC or proprietary libraries due to redistribution rights. Some of patents may start to expire soon but in general we steer clear of such components for freely available binary firmware. Not my choice btw, this is a minefield that's all too common for all open-source projects.
The benefits of mp3 offload on Baytrail are quite limited anyway due to internal SoC design choices, I wouldn't recommend you pursue this work if power optimization was the goal. Offload was mostly used for Medfield, Clovertrail, Merrifield and Anniedale platforms.
Alright, thanks a lot for letting me know! I was mostly just curious if it works when I saw that it's (theoretically) supported on bytcr-rt5640. Is there any way to check if the firmware supports it from the kernel side? It would be helpful if either the compressed ALSA device wasn't even available or if there was at least a readable error when attempting to use it. It's quite confusing when it appears to be supported but it isn't working and other people might run into this issue as well.