I am trying to understand what the expected behavior of poll() is in audio applications. I am using the pcm.c test app from alsa-lib with the following parameters. ./pcm -Dhw -c2 -r48000 -f440 --method write_and_poll The output looks like this: snd_pcm_dump(): Hardware PCM card 0 'Intel ICH6' device 0 subdevice 0 Its setup is: stream : PLAYBACK access : RW_INTERLEAVED format : S16_LE subformat : STD channels : 2 rate : 48000 exact rate : 48000 (48000/1) msbits : 16 buffer_size : 16384 period_size : 8192 period_time : 170666 tstamp_mode : NONE period_step : 1 avail_min : 8192 period_event : 0 start_threshold : 16384 stop_threshold : 16384 silence_threshold: 0 silence_size : 0 boundary : 1073741824 appl_ptr : 0 hw_ptr : 0

Now I instrumented the code in sound/core/pcm_native.c to show what events are returned by snd_pcm_playback_poll(), and I get the following pattern:

[ 176.062986] ALSA: poll event POLLOUT|POLLWRNORM, avail 8193 avail_min 8192 [ 176.066630] ALSA: null poll event, avail 175 avail_min 8192 [ 176.233739] ALSA: poll event POLLOUT|POLLWRNORM, avail 8193 avail_min 8192 [ 176.237399] ALSA: null poll event, avail 176 avail_min 8192 [ 176.404503] ALSA: poll event POLLOUT|POLLWRNORM, avail 8193 avail_min 8192 [ 176.407652] ALSA: null poll event, avail 152 avail_min 8192 [ 176.575257] ALSA: poll event POLLOUT|POLLWRNORM, avail 8193 avail_min 8192 [ 176.578995] ALSA: null poll event, avail 180 avail_min 8192 [ 176.745999] ALSA: poll event POLLOUT|POLLWRNORM, avail 8193 avail_min 8192 [ 176.749663] ALSA: null poll event, avail 176 avail_min 8192 [ 176.916750] ALSA: poll event POLLOUT|POLLWRNORM, avail 8193 avail_min 8192 [ 176.919893] ALSA: null poll event, avail 151 avail_min 8192

It looks like I am getting additional wakeups from poll instead of waiting for a complete period. Is this supposed to be ok or is there something broken here? My expectation is that the hardware would only generate interrupts when a period has elapsed, i.e avail>=avail_min. The delta shown in dmesg between two POLLOUT events matches the period duration of 171 ms, I don't understand what generates these additional null events. Am I missing something? Thanks for your help. - Pierre