[alsa-devel] integration into ASoC

[Lars-Peter Clausen]

On 03/07/2014 05:53 PM, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> Hi Liam, Mark,
>
> I have a sound IP that is part of an SoC that I'm willing to write a
> driver for.

Which SoC is this?

>
> This IP is made of a few registers to control the sampling rate, if
> we're using mono/stereo, plus two fifos, one for playback, one for
> capture, that can be seed with data. The data are then taken, go
> through a DAC, and the outer interface of the IP are directly analog
> signals (so the DAC/ADC are directly in the SoC, and the only
> interface we have is plain registers).
>
>  From what I understood from ASoC, you have mostly three components,
> the DAI, the codec and the platform that plumbers the two first
> together. Here, my understanding is that it's pretty much the whole
> three in a single IP.

The platform component usually takes care of transferring data from memory 
to your IP. It sounds as if this is still separate on your platform. Quite 
possibly you can use the generic dmaengine PCM driver. Right now ASoC 
expects you to specify a DAI link for a PCM device. The DAI link connects 
the DAIs of two components typically the SoC side and a external CODEC. In 
your case you do not have the external CODEC. You can solve this by using a 
dummy CODEC or splitting things up and register both the CODEC and the CPU 
DAI from the same driver.

But I'm currently working on a patchset that will eventually allow these 
kind of devices to be supported more naturally. It will allow to register 
them as one component that won't need the CODEC component to work.

>
> Should such a hardware block be handled into ASoC, and if yes, how?
> If not, which other framework should be used?

It makes sense to use ASoC if there are components where the driver can be 
shared e.g. the DMA in your case. Otherwise you can also use plain old ALSA.

- Lars