[alsa-devel] radio-maestro broken (conflicts with snd-es1968)

[Takashi Iwai]

At Sat, 12 Mar 2011 19:52:39 +0100,
Hans Verkuil wrote:
> 
> On Saturday, March 12, 2011 19:19:00 Ondrej Zary wrote:
> > Hello,
> > the radio-maestro driver is badly broken. It's intended to drive the radio on 
> > MediaForte ESS Maestro-based sound cards with integrated radio (like 
> > SF64-PCE2-04). But it conflicts with snd_es1968, ALSA driver for the sound 
> > chip itself.
> > 
> > If one driver is loaded, the other one does not work - because a driver is 
> > already registered for the PCI device (there is only one). This was probably 
> > broken by conversion of PCI probing in 2006: 
> > ttp://lkml.org/lkml/2005/12/31/93
> > 
> > How to fix it properly? Include radio functionality in snd-es1968 and delete 
> > radio-maestro?
> 
> Interesting. I don't know anyone among the video4linux developers who has
> this hardware, so the radio-maestro driver hasn't been tested in at least
> 6 or 7 years.
> 
> The proper fix would be to do it like the fm801.c alsa driver does: have
> the radio functionality as an i2c driver. In fact, it would not surprise
> me at all if you could use the tea575x-tuner.c driver (in sound/i2c/other)
> for the es1968 and delete the radio-maestro altogether.

I guess simply porting radio-maestro codes into snd-es1968 would work
without much hustles, and it's a bit safe way to go for now; smaller
changes have less chance for breakage, and as little people seem using
this driver, it'd be better to take a safer option, IMO.

If we have active testers for both devices, it's nicer to go forward
to clean-up works indeed, though.


thanks,

Takashi

> Both are for the tea575x tuner, although radio-maestro seems to have better
> support for the g_tuner operation. It doesn't seem difficult to add that to
> tea575x-tuner.c.
> 
> The fm801 code for driving the tea575x is pretty horrible and it should be
> possible to improve that. I suspect that those read/write/mute functions
> really belong in tea575x-tuner.c and that only the low-level gpio actions
> need to be in the fm801/es1968 drivers.
> 
> Hope this helps.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 	Hans
> 
> BTW: if anyone has spare hardware for testing the radio-maestro/tea575x-tuner,
> then I'm interested.
> 
> -- 
> Hans Verkuil - video4linux developer - sponsored by Cisco
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