On Tue, Nov 29, 2011 at 03:15:01PM -0600, Pierre-Louis Bossart wrote:

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But is this restriction guaranteed to be applicable to all possible hardwares in future? What happens if you'll get a hardware that doesn't support the byte-unit push for the playback? That said, I see no obvious reason to give a restriction coupled with the stream direction.

Power consumption will be more optimized if we push bytes without looking for block boundaries on the host. But if your hardware requires parsing on the host, there's no impact on the API. You'd just write block-by-block and specify the block length instead of fixed-size value.

We've got a block based driver in development for this API - it's not had a problem interoperating thus far. So long as we can report how much data we've actually consumed I'd not anticipate any problems.