We recently came across an issue with the alsa-lib softvol plugin, which requires hardware floating-point (i.e. --with-softfloat not enabled during build) support in order to use anything but a set of default values (min gain -51 dB, max 0 dB, and 256 gain steps). With no hardware floating point support, the plugin just prints an error message when loaded.
static int softvol_load_control(snd_pcm_t *pcm, snd_pcm_softvol_t *svol, ... #ifndef HAVE_SOFT_FLOAT ... double v = (pow(10.0, db / 20.0) * (double)(1 << VOL_SCALE_SHIFT)); ... #else SNDERR("Cannot handle the given dB range and resolution"); return -EINVAL; #endif } ...
I'm trying to understand why it is critical to have hardware floating point support in this case. The pow() function is very resource hungry, true, but the function is only called when the plugin is loaded, and not for instance on every sample while the stream is running, so on the whole I would expect the impact to be minimal. Is there some other rationale that I'm missing?
/Ricard