On Tue, Nov 04, 2014 at 12:04:26PM +0000, Qais Yousef wrote:
On 11/04/2014 10:40 AM, Vinod Koul wrote:
On Tue, Nov 04, 2014 at 09:48:18AM +0000, Qais Yousef wrote:
Hi,
I have several questions on the best way to add AXD support in ALSA.
1st rule pls CC maintainers, so that it gets rights attention.
OK sorry about that.
The discussion of the previous patch can be found here:
https://lkml.org/lkml/2014/10/28/465
Questions:
1- What is the best example to follow to add a simple mp3 support for AXD? The only one I find is in sst-mfld-platform-compress.c in sound/soc/intel directory but it's a bit confusing. I think because it's sharing code with several other sst drivers/platforms.
There are two ways
- If you are a ASoC driver which is most likely the case, then add a
compress dai and then a compress dai-link. The device with compress device will be created. 2. Directly call compress_register the way asoc does
For both you need to implement the compressed ops
Thanks for the pointers :)
I find the documentation for compress_offload generally lacking. Is there a plan to improve on that? Being a new comer to ALSA framework api, I'm confused what is the correct way to do things :-/
Are you talking about kernel API or driver API? Can you please elaborate
Driver API. A new section in 'Writing an ALSA Driver' for compress offload would be helpful for example.
Not really. I think Writing ASoC driver would help :)
More I think of you issues, it seems to me that first you need to comprehend how ASoC works and model your device properly. The things like registers which were in last post would be modeled as ASoC widgets. Once you comprehend that then the compress is just a dai, dailink and ops addition.
snd_compress_register() for example is not clear in what context it needs to be called. I failed to find any reference to a user. In your pointers above I was trying to do 1 and 2 simultaneously - I didn't realise that 1 makes 2 unnecessary.
If you are asoc driver then you do need to worry about it as based on dailinks, core will call this.
It might be that I just need to spend more time on it to get it.
So far I know I need to call snd_soc_register_card(). I thought snd_compress_register() (from compress_driver.h) is how you add compressed nodes to the card but apparently not. It looks like I need to define a compress_dai? Hmmm.
You need to define a compress_dai if you are a asoc device just like the pcm dai's, it is similar to what you would need to do for PCM
2- Is tinycompress the only userland support for compress_offload? Is there anyone working on gstreamer and omx plugins to support that?
Yes, I don't know of anyone working on omx support.
Would tinycompress be part of alsa-utils and alsa-libs in the future? I know it needs more work at the moment but it'd be nice if compress_offload support is part of the standard alsa-utils and alsa-libs.
It is alsa-lib, for packaging we can make it part of alsa packages. Most users are right now in Android so no one asked yet
I'm using buildroot for my testing. So if it's included part of alsa packages that would be helpful. Also it'll help with getting gstreamer support.
3- Can we get an example of how transcoding (back to disk) is supposed to be working?
As I have replied to you last week, it would be done using two FEs and these FEs should be "routed"
OK. I need to read more to completely understand this to be honest. I don't know what's an FE and I don't know how they can be 'routed'. That's why I was hoping to get an example or a pointer to anything that does a similar thing. Just to clarify, all the necessary bits are there and I just need to use them?
Mostly yes, but if you have a typical example which doesnt work, we should be able to add support for that in framework. I think transcoding (FE-FE) should work like we have BE-BE loopback working today. Noone has built it for this usage and tested it. So I would expect some fixes to framework too.