On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Takashi Iwai wrote:
At Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:18:53 +0200 (CEST), Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Takashi Iwai wrote:
At Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:00:22 +0200 (CEST), Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
On Fri, 27 Apr 2007, Takashi Iwai wrote:
Actually, the documentation is wrong, IMO. The typical behavior of read syscall is that it returns a value actually read by that call. It doesn't guarantee whether the requested size is filled, and can be shorter than requested. As snd_pcm_readi() emulates the read syscall, it should behave in that way.
I don't think so completely. For blocking mode (!O_NONBLOCK), all possible data should be read. Only signal or an error should break this.
The read logic for dsnoop is in snd_pcm_read_areas() in pcm/pcm.c (alsa-lib).
In the current implementation, it may work in that way. But, in general, I'm against such a condition. It's not what read syscalls does, so there is no real reason that snd_pcm_readi() should do so.
Well 'man 2 read' exactly explains when a less count than requested might be returned for blocking behaviour. I'm missing something? Of course, applications should not expect to read all possible frames, but under normal conditions, less count should be returned in rare cases (for the blocking mode, of course).
The below from man page:
================ RETURN VALUE On success, the number of bytes read is returned (zero indicates end of file), and the file position is advanced by this number. It is not an error if this number is smaller than the number of bytes requested; this may happen for example because fewer bytes are actually available right now (maybe because we were close to end-of-file, or because we are reading from a pipe, or from a terminal), or because read() was interrupted by a signal. ================
So, when fewer bytes are actually available at the moment read gets called, it may return a shorter value.
The problem is that in this way, there won't be any difference between blocking I/O and non-blocking I/O. I understand situation for pipes, but we can wait to get other samples and if application wants to block, why not block?
Jaroslav
----- Jaroslav Kysela perex@suse.cz Linux Kernel Sound Maintainer ALSA Project, SUSE Labs