[alsa-devel] DMix period_size should always be half of buffer size?

[Jaroslav Kysela]

On Thu, 3 May 2007, Prabhu Sivaraja wrote:

> This is a followup to my earlier question about dmix not being able to mix
> small files. I investigated it more and here is what I found.
> 
> Again background info.
> I have a 64KB as kernel buffer and a 64KB circular buffer for my device. In
> a poll thread I copy the data obtained from ALSA lib from the kernel buffer
> to my device circular buffer by keeping track of appl_ptr and hw_ptr(dmix
> only). Everything was working fine except when I was trying to mix files
> smaller than 64KB(my buffer size), the small file was not getting mixed
> through the dmix plugin. Anything over 64KB was getting mixed just fine. So
> I set about reducing my period size from 32KB to 4KB while maintaining my
> buffer size at 64KB.
> 
> When I tried to do this my hw_ptr never gets incremented from 0. Hence my
> driver is stuck in a loop waiting for bytes to copy. This is only observed
> when I am using dmix plugin and NOT when using hw or plughw. When my period
> size is half the size of my buffer everything works fine with dmix (I
> verified this by reducing my buffer size to 8KB and making my period size
> 4KB. hw_ptr gets incremented then but I get buffer problems). It seems like
> dmix is forcing me to keep my period size half the size of my buffer. hw and
> plughw devices do not seem to do that.
> 
> Is this a limitation of dmix. Could anyone comment on the dmix limitation
> that I am experiencing.

No, dmix works with more periods well. Send us debug info from 
/proc/asound/card0/pcm0p (when the stream is opened) and check, if your 
driver notifies higher PCM level with period_elapsed() and if your 
position callback returns right value when the stream is started.

						Jaroslav

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Jaroslav Kysela <perex at suse.cz>
Linux Kernel Sound Maintainer
ALSA Project, SUSE Labs