[alsa-devel] Query on Audio DMA using DMAEngine

[Mike Looijmans]

On 08/14/2013 06:53 AM, Joel Fernandes wrote:
> On 08/13/2013 11:30 PM, Joel Fernandes wrote:
>> Hi Mike,
>>
>> On 07/02/2013 12:50 AM, Mike Looijmans wrote:
>> [..]
>>>
>>>> Either way I'm sure your multi-slot approach is superior, but I don't
>>>> see how
>>>> you can get away with not updating the DMA addresses on every IRQ with
>>>> the
>>>> current davinci-pcm or EDMA controller (Unless you use a complicated
>>>> mechanism
>>>> like ping-pong where the address updates take care of itself). If you
>>>> are using
>>>> a set of chained slots, you only have so many slots so you have to
>>>> continuously
>>>> change addresses of the slots at some point or the other for a large
>>>> transfer.
>>>
>>> I use a chain like this:
>>>
>>> DMA1 -> DMA2 -> DMA... -> DMA1
>>>
>>> This meant I had to use a DMA PARAM slot for every "period". The OMAP
>>> L138 has 128 of those slots, so it's no problem to use a bunch of them.
>>> Because the chain is cyclic, there is no need to update any DMA
>>> parameter while running. All that ALSA needs to do is empty the buffer
>>> before the cycle completes and the current position gets overwritten.
>>
>> [Joel] Replying to this thread after a long time but just wondering, how do you
>> guarantee in your implementation that DMA will not empty the buffer
>> faster than it is filled?
>
> I guess this is also what you've called in some threads as the overrun
> condition.

Indeed. Alsa monitors the "position" of the ring, and when the DMA 
passes the application's "cursor", it reports an underrun or overrun 
(depending on whether it's capture or playback).

There is no guarantee - only verification. The user's application must 
keep up, or suffer the consequenses. My customer has been using the 
modified driver to capture 16 channels of 32-bit data at 50kHz for quite 
a while now. Before the modification, it wasn't even possible to 
reliably capture more than 4 channels.

Mike.


Met vriendelijke groet / kind regards,

Mike Looijmans

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