On 02/13/2012 06:40 PM, Takashi Iwai wrote:
At Mon, 13 Feb 2012 07:44:59 -0800, Mark Brown wrote:
On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 02:56:55PM +0100, Takashi Iwai wrote:
Mark Brown wrote:
There's rather a lot of people who do embedded development and do need to look at this stuff, though. There's a real cost to raising the bar for humans to understand things.
Hm, I'm afraid that this is getting apart from the real worth discussion. I'm interested in whether "Line-Out" is acceptable enough, or it's a matter of taste, just like Marmite is acceptable as the normal English breakfasts.
Well, I dunno - you did suggest adding direction modifiers to the jack names which would both be a more general solution to the problem and clean up the naming issue.
OK, let's postpone about it.
I've seen enough "Line-Out"s in my life that I'm pretty sure everyone will understand it, even though "Line Out" is more common.
with the input-jack layer. The input-jack doesn't provide the index number. So, you can't register the same name correctly. Thus I tried to create a unique name string as input-jack id.
It's really never been the intention to have an "input-jack" layer -
I called it just to distinguish with kctl jack, not intended to stress that it's an input layer.
the API is there to hide all the input layer stuff it can from the individual audio drivers. The only thing that leaks out is the button remapping which I couldn't think of anything more sensible to do with them.
Now, looking back to your implementation, the kctl jack is created with a name string based on the switch type, not from the name string passed to snd_jack_new() itself. Why not passing the string as is?
We can't pass it as-is since we'll need multiple controls per jack - literally all the systems I have available to test on would fail if they used the same name as they all have headset jacks. As I said further up the thread my plan had been to refactor the name generation code once the separate kctl code is gone and they can be merged into the same source file which makes this a lot easier.
Makes sense.
With these patches I'm mainly looking for a quick and simple refactoring to get rid of the duplication - once we've got rid of the duplicate driver APIs then we can refactor the internals of the implementation however we like but there's a pretty pressing need to fix the driver API and get all the drivers doing the same thing to userspace even if it's not ideal.
Hm, then I'd say let's hold on. Merging this half-baked stuff is rather confusing at this point since the use of kctl jack isn't targeted yet for ASoC.
I believe what we need _now_ is to decide the policy (i.e. element naming rule and TLV definitions) for kctl jacks quickly.
If multiple kctls are needed (e.g. for headset), you can either create a new name or just create the multiple instances with the same name but give extra TLVs to identify which type it is. Or, you can create an enum control so that both the input-jack and the kctl-jack correspond as 1:1.
This stuff is why I've been asking you about the ABI and general semantics for the new controls, I was never sure what the intention was
- when you said they were just plain booleans I just went ahead and
created multiple controls as that seemed to be what the current idiom was.
I don't think an enumeration is going to scale so well given the number of possible combinations you can get on more complex jacks.
OK.
In other words, if 1:1 mapping isn't needed, we don't have to create a different name string at all. Just create "Jack Detect" controls with different indices and with corresponding TLVs. This would be enough (could be even easier) for a machine parser.
That'd work I think, though I would create a new control for each physical jack at least just for clarity.
They are indeed individual ctl elements. They just share the same name and are distinguished by the index numbers. For the parser program, it would be even easier because it needs to look only for elements containing the single string. The rest is the parse of TLVs of gathered elements, which would be needed no matter whether we have multiple name strings or not.
And, it seems that there is no standard rule defined for the id string of input-jack. If 1:1 model is used, we'd need to define this rule.
The input stack doesn't have the same concept of machine parsable names for things that ALSA does (honestly that's pretty unique to ALSA within the kernel) - the names it users are all free form text intended to be meaningful to humans only.
Yeah, maybe. But, if you have two headset jacks, how would you identify with the current jack stuff...?
BTW, I found another issue. With this implementation, you can't build kjack ctl without input-jack. I can work around it for HD-audio by adding more ifdef, but it'd be ugly...
I really don't see this as a problem; it seems vanishingly unlikely that any realistic system would want to disable the input API and need accessory detection. Obviously the end goal here is that you wouldn't be able to have HDA specific hacks in the code as everything will be handled by the ALSA core code...
Yeah, the more code may be moved toward the core once when we decide the standards.
To my mind we should just support everything and let userspace worry about deciding what to use, this isn't the sort of thing which should require a kernel rebuild to configure and it's not like there's any fundamental problem or massive overhead caused by having the devices show up.
That's one option, yes. OTOH, people always want to diet the kernel code. It's a good dream that is hardly to achieve in reality (for human beings, too), though.
So, at this point, I can list the following policies for kctl jacks:
A. all kctls have one name string with different indices. Each jack is distinguished by the TLV provided to each kctl.
B. kctls are built with only a base name ("Headphone", "Mic") with different indices and TLVs.
C. kctls contain unique names ([location] base [direction] [channel]) optionally with TLVs
I would vote for "C2", although I would probably prefer "[location] base [channel]" over "[location] base [direction] [channel]", as direction is superfluous given "base". This is also what the current implementation offers, and what I've based my PulseAudio patches on.
A and B requires additional work as we would need an API in alsa-lib from where you can read and interpret the TLVs, and stuff like amixer needs to understand it too make it reasonable easy to work with and test. And C gives the option to add TLVs later whenever we feel the need for it, so it seems to be an all-win.
Also; as this graph exposing thing is unlikely to be implemented in all layers of the audio stack any time soon, maybe C2 is also the one that gives the most obvious matching between mixer kcontrols and jack kcontrols? I'd like to move in this direction; not only because we currently do not have the graph, but also because that even if we have it, userspace apps choosing not to implement it will have a good option.
It'd be clear when thinking some real cases. Assume a headset jack containing a headphone and a mic switch: A: two kctls with TLV JACK_HEADSET but with TYPE_HEADPHONE and TYPE_MIC, respectively. B1: two kctls with the same "Headset" name, with TLV TYPE_HEADPHONE and TYPE_MIC B2: separate to a kctl with "Headphone" and a kctl with "Mic" C1: same as B1 C2: same as B2
When an extra headphone jack is added to the above, A: another kctl with TLV_JACK_HEADPHONE, TYPE_HEADPHONE B1: A kctl "Headphone" with TLV TYPE_HEADPHONE B2: A kctl "Headphone" with index 1 C1: same as B1 C2: A kctl "Rear Headphone" (and rename other "Front Headphone")
Yet more another headphone jack on left, A: another kctl with TLV_JACK_HEADPHONE, TYPE_HEADPHONE, LOC_LEFT B1: A kctl "Headphone" index 1 with TLV TYPE_HEADPHONE, LOC_LEFT B2: A kctl "Headphone" index 2 with LOC_LEFT C1: A kctl "Left Headphone" (rename other "Rear Headphone") C2: A kctl "Left Headphone"
... or does it make things more complicated? :)
thanks,
Takashi