[alsa-devel] SoC codec read callback definition

[Mark Brown]

On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 02:50:53AM -0500, Lopez Cruz, Misael wrote:

> However, actual implementation of that callback in many CODEC drivers
> may return a negative error value (i.e. when a register is out of cache
> reg size). Should the callback definition be changed to return _int_
> instead of _unsigned int_? Some drivers (like wm8900, wm9081) handle
> invalid registers with BUG_ON, in that case it's not necessary to
> return the negative error code.

There's two classes of error.  Reads from the hardware might possibly
fail at runtime, while reads from cache should never fail - an attempt
to read from an uncached register is a clear bug in the driver.  When
the code was originally written there were essentially no devices with
readback so the cache was the only option.

> What should be the best way to handle this? Or is it ok as currently
> implemented? Well, it was just a thought.

Ideally we'd have error codes but that would loose us a bit of data and
IIRC there's at least one codec in there with 32 bit registers which
would need to be handled.