[alsa-devel] ALSA full-duplex questions

[Raymond Yau]

2009/11/05 pl bossart <bossart.nospam at gmail.com>

>
> Hi,
> I have a very low-*latency* full-duplex application where I would like
> up- and downlink to be synchronous, i.e. period events happen at the
> same time for capture and playback. This would minimize the number of
> wake-ups and enable the platform to go to low power.
>
>
What kind of full-duplex application and how low latency your application
need ?


> I thought snd_pcm_link() would enable this coupling between capture
> and playback, but it looks like it only buids a list of linked devices
> and uses this information for state transitions. Said transitions
> don't look quite atomic by looking at the code. The
> alsa-lib/test/*latency*.c code even tries to measure the difference
> between the number of samples read/written.
> In short the question is whether I can force a synchronous behavior
> from my application, or if I need to roll up my sleeves and fix the
> drivers to see this behavior?
>
>
http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.alsa.devel/37367/focus=37388

To get low latency , your application have to use small period size (i.e.
your system is unlikely go to low power mode )

BTW. do you know how PA calculate "Final latency" ?

D: memblockq.c: memblockq requested: maxlength=4194304, tlength=44100,
base=4, prebuf=44100, minreq=3528 maxrewind=0
D: memblockq.c: memblockq sanitized: maxlength=4194304, tlength=44100,
base=4, prebuf=44100, minreq=3528 maxrewind=0
I: protocol-native.c: Final latency 460.00 ms = 210.00 ms + 2*20.00 ms +
210.00 ms
D: module-alsa-sink.c: latency set to 46.44ms
D: module-alsa-sink.c: hwbuf_unused_frames=1
D: module-alsa-sink.c: setting avail_min=4662
D: module-alsa-sink.c: Requesting rewind due to latency change.


> Another solution I thought of would be to disable the period events on
> one of the devices, and handle both devices at once when one period
> event fires. But I am not sure you can disable all events for an audio
> device (was on the wish list of Lennart, not sure if it became
> reality?)
> Thanks for your feedback.
> - Pierre
>
>