Hi Mark,
Even with automotive there's *some* power limits and obviously the power control also includes things like syncing startup of the algorithms with the data path
I dont think that needs to be absolutely done as a part of kernel layer.
Well, yes. Unless someone writes a card driver the CPU driver won't do anything useful but then without the card driver you've no idea how the system is actually wired up and the chances of it doing anything useful are close to zero. There's no getting out of the machine driver.
This is the point. Why write a card driver? For example audio over MOST or for HDMI audio? Or when I have some utility in userspace to test the functionality. Wont it be better to atleast enumerate the driver and show the capabilities it supports? This can help in many phases of design like emulation, bringup (doing loopback between 2 interfaces at SOC level)?
So far I have been using ALSA for the userspace utilites it supports (alsalib), for codec support I dont feel need that its absolutely needed (spdif/hdmi for instance) and this can be applied to even other machine drivers.
Cant we have support for all this, if not codec, somewhere else?
Thanks, Nitin