On 2019-11-05 20:36, Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
Hi all,
I make some internal ucm code cleanups in alsa-lib and added three major extensions to allow more complex configurations which we require for the SOF kernel driver.
The first thing is the added substitution for the value strings:
https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-lib/commit/f1e637b285e8e04e6761248a070f...
The second thing is the If block:
https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-lib/commit/985715ce8148dc7ef62c8e3d8ce5...
The third thing is the card / hardware like specifier passed as the ucm name to snd_use_case_mgr_open() to support multiple card instances:
https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-lib/commit/60164fc5886cdc6ca55eeed0c2e3...
All those patches (with other cleanups) are in the ucm2 branch on github for comments:
https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-lib/commits/ucm2
The proposed SOF UCM config diff is here:
https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf/commit/723b6da881721488229154e...
https://github.com/alsa-project/alsa-ucm-conf/commits/ucm2
I added everything to keep the interface backward compatible, so the current applications should not observe any different behavior. The applications like pulseaudio should use the 'hw:CARD_INDEX' specifier for the open call in the future and snd_use_case_parse_ctl_elem_id() helper for the element control names.
If you have another ideas to address those issues, please, let me know.
BTW, Mark: The SOF UCM configs relies on the driver name changes, so it might be worth to send "ASoC: intel - fix the card names" patch to 5.4 to make things stable more quickly:
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/broonie/sound.git/commit/?h=...
Thanks, Jaroslav
Thanks for your work, Jaroslav.
However, I have some concerns here. First, could you elaborate on "we require for the SOF kernel driver"?
The substitutions and multi-instance support is probably warmly welcomed by many, but "If" blocks are what worries me. Especially the nested "Ifs". As Takashi pointed already out, UCM - which is currently is viewed as a simple configuration syntax - is becoming a language on its own. If we are to keep extending UCM on and on, we might as well switch to JSON/ XML/ YAML entirely instead of developing our own thingy.
"If" block could just be what's needed to open new pandora box, allowing for very complex and no longer easy-to-read config files. In general, if one is to enlist an "If", why not define two UCMs instead?
Moreover, I see you mentioning the card-name dependency. This sounds rather invasive. Separation of different config-versions would be required.
Czarek