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

[Jaroslav Kysela]

Dne 27. 01. 20 v 16:28 Liam Girdwood napsal(a):
> On Thu, 2020-01-23 at 16:07 +0000, Mark Pearson wrote:
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: Sound-open-firmware <sound-open-firmware-bounces at alsa-
>>> project.org> On Behalf Of Pierre-Louis Bossart
>>> Sent: Monday, January 13, 2020 10:47 AM
>>>
>>>> The all-in-one package is useful for:
>>>>
>>>> 1) debugging .ldc files - they don't belong to any of the
>>>> upstream repos
>>>
>>> I just want to clarify something on those files: Rather than adding
>>> strings to all our traces, when generating the firmware we strip
>>> them
>>> out to reduce the firmware footprint, and the actual strings are
>>> stored
>>> in the ldc. When you want to extract traces, the sof-logger tool
>>> substitutes the codes for human-readable strings. The ldc files
>>> only
>>> existing in relation with the initial firmware they were extracted
>>> from.
>>>
>>> I don't see at all why these ldc files can't be distributed along
>>> with
>>> the firmware. In fact, we could change the firmware format and add
>>> them
>>> in a single file, which would be stripped during firmware download
>>> and
>>> you'd not even know about it...
>>>
>>>> 2) SOF release - you have full control to put all things together
>>>> and
>>>>      we can use this as a reference; eventually, we can update the
>>>> community
>>>>      integration repos from this
>>>
>>> So we are talking about multiple integration channels, that's not
>>> so
>>> good for us
>>>
>>>> 3) extra firmware files (not used by default kernel configuration
>>>> / code)
>>>
>>> We don't have such cases at the moment.
>>>
>>>> It does not mean that the stable code should not be pushed to the
>>>> "integration" repositories (where the code is merged from the
>>>> multiple
>>>> sources). But in case of issues (debugging) or if you have
>>>> special users
>>>> (firmware for special hardware variants requiring the extra
>>>> kernel
>>>> parameters / setup), the users might look back to the all-in-one
>>>> repo
>>>> (SOF project release).
>>>
>>> I would really like to have all .ldc distributed by default so that
>>> we
>>> can ask for traces without requiring any install shenanigans.
>>> People are
>>> able to use alsa-info.sh, and I consider the .ldc files as a
>>> extension
>>> helping provide DSP traces.
>>
>> 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.

I think that you can just pack everything together in your repo. We can pick / 
split things in the packaging process.

My reasoning is only against the .ldc files in the linux-firmware repo.

					Thanks,
						Jaroslav

-- 
Jaroslav Kysela <perex at perex.cz>
Linux Sound Maintainer; ALSA Project; Red Hat, Inc.