The use case tends to be for applications that have one device per physical output. This isn't normally mobile, it's normally high performance audio applications where people are doing things to try to electrically isolate the analogue outputs or dealing with high power so need to keep speaker outputs physically separate. I can imagine set top box type applications (which do use offloaded media decode) doing this.
Not sure if I follow you, I have no idea of how these systems work.
They're having the SoC play stereo (or whatever) data and then having multiple CODECs on the bus, each parsing some subset of the channels (typically one channel per CODEC).
This sort of stream aggregation/split is a very valid use case that's coming to mobiles in the very near future with new interfaces being standardized.
So how can we have a situation where we have compressed device linked to multiple codecs?
If it's intended to be DPCM only (which it iss now I think about it) it sounds like you can't have it linked to *any* real CODECS, at least not directly!
there are very few references to codec_dais in soc-compress and some are in sections copy/pasted from soc-pcm, which makes me wonder as well if they needed to be there in the first place. -Pierre