[alsa-devel] hw_params function and OSS emulation

[Timur Tabi]

Takashi Iwai wrote:

>> On a side note, I notice that ALSA has some scatter-gather support.  If an 
>> application uses S/G, I presume the concept of a DMA buffer size doesn't even 
>> apply?
> 
> The SG-buffer isn't for applications but for drivers.  From the
> application viewpoint, the buffer looks linear.

Yes, but in SG, the application allocates the DMA buffer, and a list of 
physical addresses is passed to the driver.  Normally, the driver allocates 
the DMA buffer and passes a virtual address to the app.  Therefore, the DMA 
buffer processing for SG is completely different than for driver-allocated 
buffers, including the concept of a DMA buffer length.

For normal DMA buffers, I would specify a limit of 64KB just because of the 
problems with multiple calls to .hw_params() and .prepare().  I could support 
much larger DMA buffers, but not with the way ALSA calls the driver.

For SG, I haven't looked at the API, but I assume that the ALSA gives a list 
of physical addresses to the driver only *once*.  In this case, my DMA buffer 
limitations are much larger, since I just give the list of addresses to my 
hardware and it does the rest.  So I would hope that the application *doesn't* 
use the DMA buffer size limit in my snd_pcm_hardware structure.

-- 
Timur Tabi
Linux Kernel Developer @ Freescale