tl;dr Is anyone against me exposing all the stuff currently in /proc/asound via sysfs files? And then can I add more stuff?
On Sun, May 11, 2014 at 12:50 AM, Clemens Ladisch clemens@ladisch.dewrote:
Adam Goode wrote:
I am working on a seq implementation for Chrome, to replace the rawmidi implementation. I can retain the manufacturer extraction hack on the
card,
but seq requires yet another hack to guess the card for a particular seq client.
Did you test this with anything besides USB devices?
No, this heuristic only works for USB devices.
And software clients do not have a card.
That's fine. The manufacturer field is optional when exposed to Web MIDI clients. But it would be great if we could expose the information when it is already present in the kernel.
Any suggestions on how to extract the manufacturer more easily? The best solution would be to add a manufacturer (or vendor) field to the snd_seq_client_info ioctl struct.
Old clients would not know to set this field.
That's fine, I am not worried about type=user clients. In most cases there isn't really a useful manufacturer there.
The Core MIDI documentation says: | kMIDIPropertyManufacturer | Drivers *should* set this property on their devices. | Creators of virtual endpoints *may* set this property on their endpoints.
So what happens on OS X if this is not set?
In this case, we don't expose the manufacturer via Web MIDI.
A completely different solution would be to add all this info to sysfs
USB devices already have this information in sysfs.
This is true. Unfortunately, here are the current steps to get this information: 1. Given a seq client, attempt to guess the card by making assumptions about client->card numbering. 2. From the card, attempt to guess the manufacturer by making assumptions about how longname is constructed. Or, attempt to extract the usb information from the card info struct and then try to get the info from /sys (but this gives us only the manufacturer string from usb, not the quirk vendor name that the usb midi driver knows about).
What I would like to do is make these mappings explicit. Because Alsa is very ioctl driven, I was thinking the way to do this is through the existing ioctl API. But since I really just want to expose a lot more read-only info about the system, perhaps files in /sys would be an acceptable way to expose this information. At least, I would like to take the rather detailed information stored in /prod/asound and expose this in a more sysfs way via /sys, then add more fields and info. Does this sound reasonable?
How about an easy solution: just use "Linux". (IIRC this is what Microsoft's MME/WDM bridge driver does.)
Yes, that is a solution. :) But I think we can do better here.
Regards, Clemens
Thanks, Adam