[alsa-devel] [Pkg-alsa-devel] Bug#436502: alsa-tools -> usx2yloader

[Michael Bourgeous]

On 9/13/07, Elimar Riesebieter <riesebie at lxtec.de> wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Sep 2007 the mental interface of
> Michael Bourgeous told:
> > A better option might be a patch to us428control to add a daemonize
> > switch (which, of course, could be as simple as fclose()-ing stdin,
> > stdout, and stderr, and dealing with any I/O functions accordingly).
>
> Hmm, from my patch tascam_fw and tascam_fpga are installed to
> /lib/udev. The udev rules are calling these scripts which are almost
> doing what your udev rule is doing manualy, isn't it?
> There is one user [0], who came along with an rule similar to the
> attached which still works. My intention is not do rewrite
> usx2yloaders, but optimize it for distribution.
>
> I don't know whether upstream is active to help? A statement from
> Karsten Wiese would be helpfull at that point ;)
>
> But if your rule works for sure, I can distribute it with your
> allowness. There are still ugly sh -c calls I don't understand yet.
>
> [0] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=361558
>
> Thanks for your competent input ;)
>
> Elimar
>

The sh -c was necessary to keep udev from hanging when loading the
US-224 and US-428 (because of us428control).  I don't remember why I
chose not to use the existing scripts, but one thing I don't like
about those scripts is that they will load the firmware for /all/
Tascam USB devices, not just the one currently being probed by udev.
This could either confuse udev or try to load the firmware multiple
times for each device, possibly resulting in errors.  Unfortunately,
all of the utilities involved (fxload, usx2yloader, us428control)
expect the old hotplug-style device path (/proc/bus/usb/111/222)
instead of the sysfs/udev-style path (what a mess this udev switch
still causes).

I just spent the last three hours trying to fix this problem, and I
can only come to the conclusion that udev is horribly broken.  For
example, my firmware load rule gets called not only when the USB
device comes on, but each time ALSA adds a new device from the usx2y
(i.e. control, mixer, PCM, etc.), resulting in a lot of wasted time,
and many erroneous calls to usx2yloader.  Moreover, the rule gets
called once for every device /removed/, even though it says
ACTION="add".  Finally, it seems that every now and then, udev tries
the whole process over again, even though the firmware is loaded and
us428control is running.  Why do we have to keep breaking things that
work?

At any rate, I've made a slightly improved version of my previous
script, which you may distribute under any free license, if it is
found to be better than the alternatives.

Mike Bourgeous
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