[alsa-devel] ALSA: hda: hdmi: Hint matching between input devices and pcm devices

[Stephen Warren]

David Henningsson wrote at Tuesday, August 23, 2011 10:54 PM:
> On 2011-08-23 17:51, Stephen Warren wrote:
> > David Henningsson wrote at Tuesday, August 23, 2011 9:12 AM:
> >> Since modern HDMI cards often have more than one output pin and thus
> >> input device, we need to know which one has actually been plugged in.
> >>
> >> This patch adds a name hint that indicates which PCM device is connected
> >> to which pin.
> >>
> >> To do that, the jack creation has been deferred to build_controls, i e,
> >> after the PCM devices have been created.
> >>
> >> Would be great to have Stephen look through this patch quickly before
> >> it's committed.
> 
> Thanks for the review!
> 
> > Structurally, I think this looks OK. The only question I have is the
> > string format:
> >
> > "HDMI/DP (pcm %d)", pcmdev
> >
> > * Is there a 1:1 mapping between the internal pcmdev numbers and what
> > alsa-lib presents to clients?
> 
> That's very much up to the configuration in alsa-lib, but I would say
> that alsa-lib in general does that, and especially for HDA.
> 
> > Thinking about ALSA device numbering, it's
> > like "hw:1,3", so includes the card number too; should that be in the
> > string?
> 
> The matchup against the card can be done both in sysfs, and using the
> card name, which is later prefixed to that string. The end result would
> be something like "HDA NVidia HDMI/DP (pcm 3)"

OK, so if the string that user-space sees already has the card name, that's
probably enough in practice, although it still seems a little free-form.

One issue with the above string: There's no delimiter that user-space can
use to extract just the card name from the whole string. Perhaps add a
":" at the start so there's a delimiter?

"HDA NVidia: HDMI/DP (pcm 3)"
"HDA NVidia: pcm 3"

?

> It's possible though, and somewhat simpler than matching against sysfs
> to add the card number as well.
> 
> > * Would it be better to make the string completely generic - i.e. not
> > include "HDMI/DP", but rather something like "ALSA PCM %d", or even
> > "ALSA PCM hw:%d,%d" so that the same format could be used for non-HDMI/
> > DP PCMs in the future?
> 
> That would probably be bad, as there would be no way to distinguish
> between e g "Headphone" and "Headphone 2".

Are those two different analog outputs from the same PCM device?

If so, I don't see a problem with having both those jack's input devices
reporting the same PCM name; user-space will just see 2 matches and know
that the PCM device is useful if either is plugged in.

If not, I'm afraid I don't have enough context to understand your comment.

> This is a HDMI specific
> problem in general, as all analog outputs and inputs are at ,0 and SPDIF
> at ,1. (Although there might be exceptions, the "Independent HP" thing
> of the VIA drivers come to mind.)

Hmm. I don't see it as HDMI specific. If there's a random input device
today that represents the analog output's jack detection, how does user-
space know the input device is for analog (sub-device 0) at all? Isn't
the exact same issue present for any kind of output; I don't how the
,0/,1/,3 numbering affects this. Sorry!

> Up to now, I believe the string in the name has been pretty arbitrarily.
> E g, I have "Headphone" on one machine and "HP Out" on another. Should
> we try to establish a format where various parameters can be added, it
> might be good to try something like ",name=value". Should we add card as
> well, the result would be e g: "HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,card=2,pcm=3"

That sounds pretty sane to me.

-- 
nvpublic