-----Original Message----- From: alsa-devel-bounces@alsa-project.org [mailto:alsa-devel-bounces@alsa- project.org] On Behalf Of Mark Brown Sent: Saturday, July 04, 2009 4:02 PM To: Koul, Vinod Cc: alsa-devel@alsa-project.org Subject: Re: [alsa-devel] [PATCH] [RFC 0/13] Intel SST drivers
On Fri, Jul 03, 2009 at 11:36:03AM +0530, Koul, Vinod wrote:
There are 2 drivers involved. One is for the audio DSP engine that can decode and do audio processing and one is for the ALSA sound card driver with support for three different sound cards that are supported on the platform.
Looking at this I'm wondering how general purpose the DSP on these parts is. This sort of integrated DSP is fairly common in modern embedded CPUs but normally the DSP is exposed in a more general fashion, allowing the DSP to be used for non-audio purposes as well which means that the DSP management code tends to live outside the sound tree.
Given what you're saying about Intel-provided firmwares it is possible that while the hardware is capable of general purpose use you're not exposing sufficient information for people to actually write their own firmware in which case that's less of an issue and the situation is closer to that with things like WiFi cards but I thought it was better t ask.
The DSP is Low power audio engine and not a general purpose DSP. The DSP is optimized for Audio decode/encode offload and rendering. Yes we are thinking of situation closer to WiFi cards
Thanks, Harsha