[alsa-devel] How to start with a driver for custom hardware?

[javier.martinc at alumnos.unican.es]

I am trying to develop an ALSA compatible driver for a custom hardware.

The situation is the following:
We are using a Cyclone II FPGA with a nommu NiosII processor and uClinux.
We have an external TLV320AIC110 codec with I2C control interface and PCM audio
interface.
Into the FPGA we have a hardware module which controls both interfaces and
basically copies x amount of data into a given memory position and vice versa.

I have been looking at the documentation (which in my honest opinion is scarce)
and  many doubts have arisen.

For example, should I used alsa or asoc? In my opinion, alsa documentation is
more clear than asoc, but it is highlt oriented to pci drivers.

As you can see it is a simple hardware which control registers are mapped into
memory. Which part of the alsa driver takes care of accesing these hardware
dependent registers?

Maybe we should use some other standard hardware module into the FPGA to get
better alsa compliance?

I know these are very generic and begginer questions but, anyway, any help will
be welcome.

Thank you.

Javier Martín