[Sound-open-firmware] [External] Re: Distribution of sof firmware and tplg files

[Tanu Kaskinen]

On Mon, 2020-01-27 at 15:28 +0000, Liam Girdwood wrote:
> On Thu, 2020-01-23 at 16:07 +0000, Mark Pearson wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > I've been following this thread with interest and thank you all for
> > your efforts on working on this.
> > Did we reach consensus on the solution? If we did I think I missed
> > it. Please let me know.
> 
> I hope so. The main contention point is the home for .ldc files and
> probably the topology binaries.
> 
> > We have a lot of users waiting for this and I know I'll be working
> > with the distro's to get this rolled out when it's available. 
> > If there's anything I can do to help let me know - I don't have
> > enough expertise to comment on the solution so I've been keeping
> > quiet 😊.
> > 
> 
> There was a SOF TSC meeting last week and the outcome was to create a
> separate "sof-bin" repo to store the binary outputs of the SOF build
> processes. This would include the FW, .ldc files and binary topologies.
> 
> The part that is not clear to me (since I'm not a packager) is how to
> add the necessary packaging infrastructure in this repos to create rpm
> and deb files.
> 
> I would imagine we would want to create 2 packaging targets 
> 
> 1) sof-bin (fw binaries and topology binaries)
> 
> 2) sof-bin-dbg (ldc files).
> 
> I hope this proposal would also be acceptable to Jaroslav ?
> 
> I can create a repo with the correct binaries but would need help from
> Jaroslav, Tanu or yourself getting the packing added.

Sorry for the slow reply. It sounds like you want to add packaging to
the upstream repo, but why? Distributions can and will maintain the
packaging bits themselves.

I maintain the ALSA recipes in the OpenEmbedded core layer (which is
used by Yocto), including alsa-topology-conf and alsa-ucm-conf, and I
guess I could present my thoughts here for the curious.

Currently SOF isn't packaged in OpenEmbedded. My understanding is that
at least currently SOF is only used on Intel platforms, so if someone
is going to package SOF for OpenEmbedded, it will probably be via the
"meta-intel" layer, which I'm not involved with. I saw a message from
Daniel Baluta in this thread, and he said that he's working on Yocto,
but I'm not familiar with his work, is it for the meta-intel layer or
something else?

I got the impression that the SOF firmware will get distributed also
via the linux-firmware repo, and I'm a bit worried about a dependency
between linux-firmware and alsa-topology-conf (and alsa-ucm-conf?). The
linux-firmware recipe isn't updated in sync with the ALSA recipes, is
that going to cause problems? Can an update in linux-firmware cause
breakage if alsa-topology-conf isn't updated at the same time, or vice
versa? If so, maybe I should push the alsa-topology-conf (and alsa-ucm-
conf?) maintenance to the linux-firmware maintainer or otherwise make
sure that updates are done in sync. I hope the kernel itself isn't
another component in the chain that can cause breakages if not kept in
sync with all the other components.

-- 
Tanu

https://www.patreon.com/tanuk
https://liberapay.com/tanuk