[alsa-devel] Query on Audio DMA using DMAEngine

[Mark Brown]

On Tue, Jul 02, 2013 at 07:50:16AM +0200, Mike Looijmans wrote:
> On 07/02/2013 05:33 AM, Joel Fernandes wrote:

> But even with much lower loads, I got underruns when recording to SD
> card that I couldn't really explain. I noticed that the SD transfers
> took up a lot of DMA params (about 40), so maybe that was just
> causing too much work for the IRQ or DMA handler routines.

SD cards are generally just slow, it's possible it's just not able to
keep up with the data you're throwing at it.  Things like batching the
writes up into large chunks can help here but you may just be hitting a
genuine limit if you need to record for too long and don't have enough
fast storage (like RAM) to buffer.

> 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.

This sort of cyclic thing tends to be best, ideally you don't need
interrupts at all (other than a timer).
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