[alsa-devel] [pulseaudio-discuss] ASoC and pulseaudio

[Takashi Iwai]

On Tue, 15 Mar 2016 09:45:44 +0100,
Mark Brown wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 06:01:28AM +0000, Liam Girdwood wrote:
> 
> > 1) Shortname is board/machine name. This can come from DMI or device
> > tree. e.g. "Asus T100"
> 
> That seems more useful for users.
> 
> > 2) Long name is 1 + driver name + optional firmware name. (I've just
> > added the FW name here too as we can have potentially > 1 FW per driver
> > - BYT is an example) e.g. "Asus T00: byt-rt5640: IntSST1.bin".
> 
> Shouldn't we use whatever we use to figure out which firmware to load
> rather than the firmware name?  Someone might do something like try to
> replace one firmware with another and get everything confused.

I agree that a consistent name would be better.  Though, practically
seen, the long name isn't persistent with many drivers, as it often
contains the irq or port numbers that are assigned dynamically.  That
said, the consistency of long name isn't strictly required.  It's
regarded rather as a verbose information to user, which shouldn't be
used as an identifier key.

OTOH, the driver name is the primary id key used by alsa-lib for its
configuration.  So this must be retained through versions and unique
for each configuration.

The short name is something between them.  The alsa-lib USB-audio
config file refers to the short name because the driver doesn't
provide a unique id for driver_name for various workarounds.  But it
should be considered as an exception.  Ideally, driver_name should be
unique enough for each different configuration.


Takashi