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

[Liam Girdwood]

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.

Thanks

Liam

> Thanks
> Mark