Hi all,
I have an ASoC driver in my own branch and I'm going to get it upstream in the months ahead. The driver is designed for Freescale ASRC module, Asynchronous Sample Rate Converter. It has the capability to convert audio data without involving software conversion like SRC function in ALSA-lib. But before I try to revise and send the driver, I've a few questions here.
We currently have two main functions for ASRC: P2P's and M2M's.
1) P2P, peripheral to peripheral, regards ASRC as a FE (front end link) corresponding to a BE (back end link like ESAI<->CS42888). The P2P function resolves a problem of unsupported sample rates for BE that we can convert the unsupported audio format to a supported one before we send the data into BE. It also has better quality and less CPU loading comparing to ALSA-lib's SRC function.
* For this function, I don't see any critical problem here. But...
2) M2M, memory to memory, can simply make ASRC as a sample rate converter without playback via any BE sound card, just like using any software to convert a WAV file in one sample rate to another WAV in a required sample rate. The driver has its self-designed application to compelte this function by sending the audio data from a wave file into a misc device via non-generic ioctl:
static long asrc_ioctl(struct file *file, unsigned int cmd, unsigned long arg) { struct asrc_pair_params *params = file->private_data; void __user *user = (void __user *)arg; long ret = 0;
switch (cmd) { case ASRC_REQ_PAIR: ret = asrc_ioctl_req_pair(params, user); break; case ASRC_CONFIG_PAIR: ret = asrc_ioctl_config_pair(params, user); break; case ASRC_START_CONV: [...]
So I'm wondering if this kind of ioctl would be allowed or there's any alternative approach?
Not only having application in user space, but we also have an ASRC plugin for ALSA-lib so that it can involve M2M function by using the plugin before sending data via pcm_write().
And here's the another question -- to share the ioctl and the struct asrc_pair_params with user space, there's a header file need to be put into include/uapi/. Is it possible?
There's a reference code (drivers/mxc/asrc/mxc_asrc.c) located in: http://git.freescale.com/git/cgit.cgi/imx/linux-2.6-imx.git/tree/?h=imx_3.10...
In our internal branch, the ASRC driver currently is divided into two drivers for M2M and P2P separately. For upstream version, I'm trying to merge them into a single ASoC driver with both M2M and P2P, just not sure how to handle the M2M part appropriately.
Thank you, Nicolin Chen