[alsa-devel] Splitting out controls

[Ricard Wanderlof]

On Sat, 17 Oct 2015, Takashi Iwai wrote:

> I won't say that we can always save the world.  But there is certainly
> a room for improvement for a little bit more safety than now.  At
> least, if hardware manufacturer or system integrator already knows the
> dangerous part, we should provide some easy way to paper over it.

Is there any form of statistics on more precisely what type of failures in 
this area occur in the real world? Speakers have been mentioned (and I 
think were the original issue that started the discussion) and are a clear 
case. One could imagine output stages being overdriven (even with no load) 
in some way, or mismatched signal levels which could cause an opamp to 
fail for instance. But have any such cases been reported? It would seem 
very hard to diagnose for one thing, unless a hardware manufacturer 
explicitly noted it in some documentation (which I suspect would be very 
unlikely for say a motherboard or sound card manufacturer).

My point is really that it might be a good idea to get some idea of the 
potential failure modes before introducing a mechanism to protect us from 
them.

/Ricard
-- 
Ricard Wolf Wanderlöf                           ricardw(at)axis.com
Axis Communications AB, Lund, Sweden            www.axis.com
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