[alsa-devel] aplay -l vs. aplay -L: Missing PCMs?

[Jaroslav Kysela]

On Fri, 20 Aug 2010, Stephen Warren wrote:

> Jaroslav Kysela wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, 19 Aug 2010, Stephen Warren wrote:
>>
>>> The Azalia controller on NVIDIA GPUs gives 4 ALSA hw devices:
>>>
>>> (on card 1):
>>>
>>> [swarren at swarren-lx2 ~]$ sudo aplay -l
>>> << includes hw=1,3 hw=1,7 hw=1,8 hw=1,9 >>
>>> ... all of which appear to work OK.
>>>
>>> However, the list of available "PCMs" from aplay -L doesn't expose them all:
>>>
>>> [swarren at swarren-lx2 ~]$ sudo aplay -L
>>> <<card 0 "Nvidia" elided>>
>>> hdmi:CARD=NVidia_1
>>>    HDA NVidia, NVIDIA HDMI
>>>    HDMI Audio Output
>>>
>>> Instead, I imagined that I'd see 4 PCMs listed by "aplay -L"; one for each
>>> converter. Is this an incorrect assumption? How would I make that happen?
>>
>> There is a bug in alsa-lib to namehint.c. The code assumes that hw device
>> number is similar to logical device numbers which is not true in case of
>> your HDMI devices:
>>
>> 3, 7, 8, 9
>>
>> The fallback code is used and only first logical device 0 is created.
>>
>> Could you test this patch?
>>
>> http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-lib.git;a=commitdiff;h=97d25c0766405453d3c298bd51dd4916121a4f6a
>
> I tested that, and unfortunately it doesn't seem to work; I get the exact same
> aplay -L output.
>
> I debugged this a little, and see that add_card() is calculating the correct
> max_devices value for card=1 str=hdmi. However, in the loop that right after
> that calls try_config, when device=0, it returns 0, but when device=1, it
> returns -2 (-ENOENT). This happens inside try_config where it calls
> snd_config_search_definition (line 244 in latest git). At that point, buf is:
>
> hdmi:CARD=NVidia_1,DEV=1
>
> ... which seems reasonable.
>
> I'm a little confused about the device numbering though: The max_devices 
> value is counting values "3, 7, 8, 9" and hence gets 9. However, the 
> loop that calls try_config loops 0..max_devices-1, but bails out as soon 
> as any error is found, thus disallowing "holes" in the numbering. That 
> implies that "device" in that loop is a different numbering space? After 
> I noticed that, I hacked that loop to continue instead of break on 
> errors, and also removed the "err >= 0" condition from the loop, 
> expecting that when device==3/7/8/9, try_config might work. In fact, 0 
> still works (of course) and 1..8 all fail with err=-2, so I assume at 
> the same place in try_config.

See my description. It's assumed that the logical devices 
(hdmi:DEV=<logical_device>) are continous. Does
'aplay -D hdmi:CARD=NVidia_1,DEV=1' work in your system?

 					Jaroslav

-----
Jaroslav Kysela <perex at perex.cz>
Linux Kernel Sound Maintainer
ALSA Project, Red Hat, Inc.