[alsa-devel] [RFC] alsa-kernel clean-ups

[Takashi Iwai]

Hi,

ALSA kernel tree has lots of unused and rotten codes.  I'd like to
clean up this.  Here we go...

1. Indirect control element access

  This is what I already suggested.  This hasn't been used (we have no
  proper API in alsa-lib), and 32/64bit wrapper doesn't work at all.

  Also, the idea to copy such a big data area via ioctl is bad.  If we
  need a big matrix mixer, let make each matrix element accessible
  individually.  Copying the whole matrix at each time isn't
  efficient.

2. PCM xfer_align parameter

  This sw_params parameter has never been used in a sane manner, and
  no one understands what this does exactly.  The current
  implementation looks also buggy because it allows write of shorter
  size than xfer_align.  So, if you do partial writes, the write isn't
  actually aligned at all.

  Removing this parameter will make some pcm_lib_* code more readable
  (and less buggy).

3. PCM sleep_min and tick

  The "tick" in PCM is set (again) via sw_params.  And, nobody uses
  this feature at all except for a command line option of aplay.
  (This is literally "nobody", as I checked alsa-lib API calls in all
  programs in some major distros.)

  Above all, if we need finer wake-ups for the position update, it's
  basically an issue that the driver should solve, not tuned by each
  application.

4. sound/driver.h

  This header file exists only for some hacks to adapt alsa-driver
  tree.  It's useless for building in the kernel.  Let's move a few
  lines in it to sound/core.h and remove it.

  For building the modules on alsa-driver external tree, we can simply
  add
    #include "adriver.h"
  to each build stub (alsa-driver/*/*.c) before inclusion of
  alsa-kernel codes.


I'll post some patches to clean the above thing up in the following
posts.  Please speak up if you have objections.


Takashi