[alsa-devel] [PATCH] Improved support for different bt87x board configurations

[Trent Piepho]

On Wed, 5 Sep 2007, Mauro Carvalho Chehab wrote:
> Em Ter, 2007-09-04 Ã s 14:04 -0700, Trent Piepho escreveu:
> > There are few drawbacks.
> >
> > First, there are like 20x more cards supported by the bttv driver than by
> > the bt87x driver.  It's going to produce a very sparse card database in the
> > ALSA driver.  Note that for the most part, __initdata doesn't work, so you
> > can't say "it'll just be dropped after the driver loads."
>
> You should notice that even the way you've mapped is a a little sparse,
> since just two boards use digital_fmt.
>
> Maybe one solution for that is to use a different code or data
> structure.
>
> For example, instead of using a data struct, you could use some sort of
> code like (*) (**):
>
> static void fill_board (struct snd_bt87x_board &board, int board_id)
> {
>         board->dig_rate = 32000;
>         switch (board_id) {
>         case BTTV_BOARD_AVPHONE98:
>                 board.dig_rate = 48000,
> 		break;

I don't think gcc will be smart enough to a bunch of cases with random numbers
into a O(1) lookup, instead it will use an O(log n) branch chain.  With all
the explicit assignments, I doubt it will be much smaller, if any, since there
are just a couple board configurations.  Several board configurations are
currently duplicates and I think I'll just merge them.

But code wise I think using a switch with manual assignments is ugly.  It's a
lot more code to write and just doesn't have the regularity and elegance of a
table.

> > And if both linuxtv and alsa use the same header, what happens if they
> > don't push the changes to GIT at the exact same time?  You'll have patches
> > in one subsystem that are dependant on the other subsystem.  How will they
> > make the same merge window?
>
> This should be coordinated between me and Takashi. I have no objections
> if he pull such patch, if he is willing to send the pull request before
> myself.
>
> I don't see this as a big trouble. There are other cases like this
> already (pci_ids.h, i2c_id.h). Also, currently, there are not much bttv
> board additions anymore.

And pci_ids and i2d_id are pain to deal with.  Both v4l-dvb and ALSA have out
of kernel tree build system that try to be backward compatible with older
kernels.  When the IDs come from somewhere outside the repository, you need to
have compat patches to deal with old id files that are missing ids.  Look at
all the kernel-sync patches for those id files, all the compat code in the
various drivers for non-defined PCI ids.  There's even something I had to add
to compat.h for an i2c ID that went away in newer kernels.

It's a lot of extra work, and I just don't see the point.  To reuse a couple
defines from a bttv header file?  They are just arbitrary numbers, it's not
like there is any benefit from using the same value in both drivers.