[alsa-devel] Hardware audio decoder driver design

[Koul, Vinod]

Nikita V. Youshchenko wrote: 
> Hello.
> 
> Soon I will work on a linux kernel driver for a custom audio decoder device
> that is being developed by a company I work for. If not going into
> details, that devices reads A52-encoded stream from system memory, and
> writes raw pcm stream to system memory.
> 
> Simplest thing to do is - implement a character device, where user-space
> will write encoded stream, and from where user-space will read decoded
> stream.
> (driver for similar hardware, located at
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/vs10xx/, does that).
> 
> However, perhaps a better architecture (e.g. in-kernel intergation with an
> audio sink) is possible?
> 
> I'm looking for any related information - e.g. ideas on what interface to
> implement, examples of drivers for similar devices, etc.
We have implemented a similar scheme for our devices, please see 
staging/intel_sst/. We are currently adding alsa API for compressed path 
streaming which will also involve API for decoding compressed data and sending 
back to system memory

HTH
~Vinod