Hi Yan, (CCed to alsa-devel)

On Tue, Jan 14, 2020, at 02:07, Yannic Korten wrote:

Hey Mr. Takashi, I'm new to Linux and new to Github. If you think this is spam or you wanted to be in private: See this mail as spam - ignore and just delete it. I'm sorry then. But I have a problem and don't know whom to contact. It seems like you have much experience with coding and the usage of ALSA (which seems to be your project). So, my setup is the following: Ubuntu Studio 19.10 MOTU 324 PCI Card (detected as 'Multimedia audio controller: Mark of the Unicorn Inc PCI-324 Audiowire Interface (rev 0a)') MOTU 1224 MOTU 2408 So I tried to install your files from github but it seems not to be working. Either it's because it's just the support for some newer MOTU devices or I'm to dumb. Is it possible to get the above devices fully running on linux with your "drivers"? Or are they not supporting? Will it be possible to insert them to the code (easily)? Or is it way to much expenditure for that old devices?

Thanks for help Greetings from Germany Yan

I'm an author/maintainer of ALSA firewire stack which includes snd-firewire-motu driver. The driver can handle MOTU's FireWire series for IEEE 1394 bus; e.g. MOTU 828mkII. Unfortunately, the driver is unavailable for your model.

Your model is not compliant to IEEE 1394. It's for 'AudioWire', which is proprietary protocol developed by MOTU. Like 1394 OHCI card is for IEEE 1394 bus, PCI-324/424 ASIC card is for 'AudioWire'. The ASIC is designed by MOTU itself (Precisely S&S Research, Inc.) and the detail is closed.

Although PCI-324/424 card has physical ports into which IEEE 1394 cables can connect, and actually AudioWire uses the same cable of IEEE 1394a, signals in the cable is completely different from IEEE 1394. In the summer of 2015, I bought AudioWire-based model (it's really cheep in used market) and attempted to connect it to my IEEE 1394 bus analyzer. As I expected, nothing can be detected.

I guess that PCI-324/424 ASIC integrates a sort of computing core (e.g. ARM7TDMI) with PCI interface for AudioWire protocol. For this kind of device, people need to work for reverse-engineering by analyze MOTU driver's behaviour in memory space mapped to host system, and write new driver to emulate the behaviour.

However, this is a kind of 'adventure' and no guarantee to achieve. On the other hand, it certainly consumes the batch of developer's resources, unless getting enough assists by vendors. This is a reason that you cannot see AudioWire compliant drivers as Open Source Software.

Regards

Takashi Sakamoto