[alsa-devel] Triggering a DAPM widget event

[Mark Brown]

On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 07:08:31PM +0100, Harrod, John wrote:

http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/on_top

> I ran a few experiments where I frequently opened and closed the PCM. Under
> a heavy load, I sometimes get a resource busy error when I use the
> snd_pcm_open() call. So it looks like alsa-lib is not designed for frequent

Two issues here:
- Opening and closing streams are not the same thing as stopping and
  starting them.  From a power point of view only the stoping and
  starting of data transfer should make any difference.

- That said should be no problem with opening and closing streams as often
  as you like.  It seems most likely that if there's an issue here it's
  due to a race condition somewhere or other, quite possibly in the
  driver code.

> pcm opening and closing. I also noticed a few points in the alsa-lib code
> where dynamic memory is being allocated and freed and am wondering how this
> would affect heap fragmentation in the long term.

Obviously any dynamic memory allocator will be designed to deal with
frequent allocations and frees.  I would be astonished if this caused a
serious issue.

> So the pre-powerdown event should occur when no sound is being played? When you
> say stop the data flowing, you mean within the sound kernel module? There is
> no call that I need to make to alsa-lib (for example making a call to
> snd_pcm_pause())? It sounds like something is not working correctly in the kernel
> module...

Just stop playing data from your application.  For PCM streams from the
CPU that's all your application should need to do.

What is your actual problem here?