Dear Alsa community, I've some minor contributions in the form of patches for USB quirks for devices in the past. It occurred to me that having these USB quirks hardcoded into the driver maybe isn't the best thing.
Looking at the current quirks file, the majority of them are relatively trivial and are really just there to give the USB driver a nudge in the right direction.
Having to have these hardcoded into the driver creates a number of issues:
1. It needs someone with the expertise and will, and access the specific device for testing, to build the quirk. To hardened ALSA hackers this seems trivial, but to an average end user who has a device they want to get supported, this can be pretty inpenatrable. The complexity of just getting the alsa source installed and set up for compilation is enough to put off the vast majority of users.
2. It makes the process of getting the driver "to market" lengthy as these changes have to go through all of the normal release schedules, and these are pretty opaque.
3. It makes getting changing a driver (because of a bug, or a new release of hardware) difficult as the revisions need to go through the whole process of creating a patch, getting it accepted, and then the long kernel release process, as well as the various distribution release processes.
It occured to me that there might be a better way where quirks like this could be dynamically loaded into the driver after it has loaded. This would a structured text file describing the quirk to be created and pushed into the driver. Ultimately this could be wrapped into a framework where quirk files could be put into a common directory (similar to modprobe.d) with a startup script which pushed these into the driver.
At the moment I don't have any specific thoughts about how to do this, but I thought it would be useful to elicit ideas from this community. The way I see it it needs:
* A structured file format to describe the quirks * A basic method to push these files into the driver at runtime (sysfs?) * Some sort of dynamic data area for the driver to store the data * changes to the driver to accept, store and process these data structures
At the moment I just thought I would get people thinking about this and, perhaps, making suggestions about whether it makes sense, whether it's practically achievable within the framework of the kernel and ALSA, and possible methods which might lead to a solution.
If I get the time (and, at the moment, that's unlikely for the next 6 months) I'll look at trying to code something up. If anyone else is inspired and feels like having a crack at it, then feel free.
All comments and discussion welcome.
Cheers,
Keith