[alsa-devel] Using HDA on an SoC without PCI

[Takashi Iwai]

At Fri, 14 Feb 2014 11:01:14 -0700,
Stephen Warren wrote:
> 
> On 02/14/2014 10:47 AM, Dylan Reid wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I'm working on an system with an HDMI codec on an HDA interface, but
> > that interface doesn't use PCI.  I want to re-use as much of the code
> > as possible, but I want to avoid scattering ifdefs all over
> > hda_intel.c.
> 
> I think the relevant APIs stub themselves out when appropriate, so you
> can do this all without compile-time ifdefs.
> 
> > Would gathering the pci specific functions from hda_intel.c into an
> > interface struct of some kind make sense?  If azx was probed from pci,
> > then a pci interface would be used, if it was a platform driver, then
> > the correct interface for the platform would be used.  It would add
> > some overhead to operations such as azx_writel, but that would be
> > measured to make sure it isn't detrimental to performance.
> 
> Our downstream trees do have patches to allow the HDA driver to be
> instantiated from either PCI or from platform devices. You can find the
> code in branch:
> 
> git://nv-tegra.nvidia.com/linux-2.6.git rel-roth-r3
> e.g. ef8491346266 "ALSA: hda: Add hda platform driver support"

Interesting, I'll take a look later.

> There are many other patches to sound/pci/hda after that. I don't recall
> exactly how clean taht first patch was, and probably never saw anything
> after it, but it might be a good start...

I haven't looked at your patches yet, but the HD-audio codec drivers
(hda_codec.c, patch_*.c, etc) are basically independent from the h/w
access details, and the whole PCI and DMA implementations are isolated
in hda_intel.c.  So, it shouldn't be too hard to implement on other
buses, I suppose.

If I were to implement, I'd rather write a new controller driver from
the scratch instead of hacking hda_intel.c.  The controller driver
needs to create hda_bus and hda_codecs with proper ops.  Some code
must be duplicated, but this might become cleaner in the end.
Let's see...

> We've only recently had HDMI support upstream on Tegra, otherwise it's
> possible I may have found time to try to upstream those patches before.
> Not that I have spare time:-)

Heh, famous last words ;)


thanks,

Takashi