[alsa-devel] emi62 (may be slightly off-topic)

[Takashi Iwai]

At Thu, 12 Dec 2013 02:32:13 -0500,
Monty Montgomery wrote:
> 
> > Monty, would you submit the emi driver patch to upstream?
> 
> It's been a few years since I've submitted a patch.  Last I tried,
> upstream seriously frowned on any sort of 'I wrote a whole new driver'
> type patches. But I'm happy to try if you think it would go through.

I guess merging this code shouldn't be difficult.  Of course, it'd be
better to fix trivial coding style issues scripts/checkpatch.pl
complains beforehand (and also avoid typedefs).  Once when ready, I
can give my reviewed-by tag, which will make the upstream merge
easier.

> >  We can keep
> > the old EMI26 and EMI62 at first but make them conflicting with EMI
> > driver via Kconfig.  The external firmware files are maintained in
> > linux-firmware tree nowadays.  Once all things get merged, the old
> > emi26/62 can be faded away.
> 
> Sure, that sounds perfectly sensible.

FWIW, a patch would be like below:

-- 8< --
--- a/drivers/usb/misc/Kconfig
+++ b/drivers/usb/misc/Kconfig
@@ -4,7 +4,8 @@
 comment "USB Miscellaneous drivers"
 
 config USB_EMI62
-	tristate "EMI 6|2m USB Audio interface support"
+	tristate "EMI 6|2m USB Audio interface support (deprecated)"
+	depends on !USB_EMI
 	---help---
 	  This driver loads firmware to Emagic EMI 6|2m low latency USB
 	  Audio and Midi interface.
@@ -18,7 +19,8 @@ config USB_EMI62
 	  module, say M here and read <file:Documentation/kbuild/modules.txt>.
 
 config USB_EMI26
-	tristate "EMI 2|6 USB Audio interface support"
+	tristate "EMI 2|6 USB Audio interface support (deprecated)"
+	depends on !USB_EMI
 	---help---
 	  This driver loads firmware to Emagic EMI 2|6 low latency USB
 	  Audio interface.
-- 8< --

> > Looking through the tarball and codes, my only concern is the license
> > of the new firmware files...
> 
> Yes, that's what has always been problematic in the past.  I see
> there's at least a patch now to restore it to the state it was in in
> early 2.6 when it worked but was just outdated.
> 
> That said, I don't want to go through this yet again where one problem
> gets fixed, everyone gets bogged down in arguing over the rest, and
> that's the state things stay in.  That's where eMagic support has been
> since roughly 2008.  If we're not going to fix it all, and fix it for
> real, I'd honestly rather not bother.  No more partial solutions when
> the complete solution is already right here.
> 
> So before submitting a patch, I'd like to secure agreement over the
> firmware update from whomever needs to commit.  Who would that be?  If
> we can agree on that, I'm in for the rest.

The linux-firmware tree is maintained by Ben Hutchings
<ben at decadent.org.uk>.

Of course, another option would be to distribute from other places.
For example, ALSA still keeps some firmware files in alsa-firmware
package because of their strange license condition.

> I mean, it's not like we have explicit permission to distribute the
> firmware we're shipping now. :-P

Yeah, but the license issue is always picky (especially some people
are), so I won't be surprised even if they won't land to
linux-firmware tree but be distributed from somewhere else...


thanks,

Takashi