[alsa-devel] [PATCH v4 6/8] ASoC: compress: Add support for DAI multicodec

[Pierre-Louis Bossart]

>>> The use case tends to be for applications that have one device per
>>> physical output.  This isn't normally mobile, it's normally high
>>> performance audio applications where people are doing things to try to
>>> electrically isolate the analogue outputs or dealing with high power so
>>> need to keep speaker outputs physically separate.  I can imagine set top
>>> box type applications (which do use offloaded media decode) doing this.
>
>> Not sure if I follow you, I have no idea of how these systems work.
>
> They're having the SoC play stereo (or whatever) data and then having
> multiple CODECs on the bus, each parsing some subset of the channels
> (typically one channel per CODEC).

This sort of stream aggregation/split is a very valid use case that's 
coming to mobiles in the very near future with new interfaces being 
standardized.

>
>> So how can we have a situation where we have compressed device linked to
>> multiple codecs?
>
> If it's intended to be DPCM only (which it iss now I think about it) it
> sounds like you can't have it linked to *any* real CODECS, at least not
> directly!

there are very few references to codec_dais in soc-compress and some are 
in sections copy/pasted from soc-pcm, which makes me wonder as well if 
they needed to be there in the first place.
-Pierre