[alsa-devel] About the platform_name field in snd_soc_dai_link

[Mark Brown]

On Tue, Aug 10, 2010 at 03:38:18PM +0200, Sascha Hauer wrote:

> I'm wondering what exactly a snd_soc_platform is. Apparently the
> snd_pcm_ops/pcm_new/pcm_free are specific to a platform. For my
> understanding these operations are more specific to a cpu_dai. Looking
> at the tree it seems that each cpu_dai has exactly one possible
> platform, which seems logical to me because the cpu_dai knows how to
> transfer the data.

They're for the DMA bit of the CPU.  While most platforms have a single
DMA controller (though some have more than one) it's moderately common
to have more than one DAI (eg, dedicated I2S and DSP mode controllers
rather than a programmable serial port, or an AC'97 controller) so it's
useful to share the DMA code.

> My problem on i.MX is that I currently have two possible cpu dais
> (imx-ssi.[01]) and each can be configured to use dma or fiq depending
> on the dma capabilities. So the cpu_dai knows which pcm_ops we have
> to use, but currently it's the soc glue code which has to decide in
> platform_name. Am I understanding something wrong here?

This is mostly a holdover from the existing (current mainline) ASoC
structuring at the minute, that also has the DMA configured per machine.
This may change depending on future hardware requirements, though.