At Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:09:19 -0600, Scott Serr wrote:

Hi All,

I've found a great way to get HDAudio vendor/device IDs when audio drivers are loaded: /proc/asound/card?/codec?

But to remake my particular (barebones) distro with with audio support, it will be repetitive and time consuming. I'm wondering what would be involved in making a user space utility that would return the HDAudio ID?

A guy on #alsa came up with some good ideas. Potentially following the lead of others directly accessing the hardware from user space http://samba.org/picturebook/ but using libpci instead. Maybe we can use "single cmd mode" so we don't need interrupts.

My original idea: It might be that a smart developer could grab a bunch of alsa/hdaudio driver source and torture it into userland.... just to get these IDs.

Should I quit now? Is it doable? Are there people here with the skills/experience to do this?

I don't think this worth to go. Clearly this is a job of the kernel to communicate with such a hardware. The question is rather how to generalize the communication.

One idea is to split the current driver into a generic HD-audio bus driver, controller driver and codec drivers. In that way, you'll get a safer access. But this would be a major rewrite, and no trivial task, although it's a good and clean direction to go.

thanks,

Takashi