I am a driver developer that is new to ALSA. I have read the tutorial as an
example on how to write an ALSA driver. I appreciate the documentation you
have provided online. I was wondering if you might have time to possibly
answer a question. I am having trouble understanding things in the
memory/buffer management area.
I am not writing a driver for a PCI device, I am writing a driver that acts
as an interface from the ALSA to a render device. So I essentially have a
circular buffer I am transferring the ALSA data to. I set up the ALSA
buffer like this:
snd_pcm_lib_preallocate_pages_for_all(pcm, SNDRV_DMA_TYPE_CONTINUOUS,
snd_dma_continuous_data(GFP_KERNEL),
ALSA_BUF_SIZE, ALSA_BUF_SIZE)) < 0);
And later on in my driver after open is called I have a buffer polling loop
that does the period notification and constantly monitors my render (ouput)
buffer. I have my asound.conf setup like this:
pcm.mix {
type dmix
ipc_key 1024
slave {
pcm "hw:0,0"
rate 48000
}
}
pcm.!default {
type plug
slave.pcm "mix"
}
This is to enable the dmix plugin so I can run aplay more than once and have
the two streams mixed in.
The problem I am having is that it seems that when I run aplay like this:
"aplay close.wav" I only see this pointer moving:
substream->runtime->status->hw_ptrbir
And if I run aplay like this: "aplay -D plughw:0,0 close.wav" I only see
this pointer moving:
substream->runtime->control->appl_ptr
This seems odd to me and currently in my code I just check which pointer
moves and use that to calculate how much data I need to write to my render
device. This is so I can support both use cases.
Another major problem is that when I play a short wav file 25KB or so and
use the dmix "aplay close.wav" it randomly doesn't play at sometimes. Also
if I run "aplay close.wav" and then very quickly run "aplay close.wav" again
at the same prompt I get corruption of the data which produces screeching.
In the case where I run aplay one right after the other I notice that the
hw_ptr moves differently (less) than if I run it, wait, run again.
I am also noticing also that when I do the aplay over and over quickly that
these values change (get lower) in my snd_pcm_prepare callback:
chip_data->buf_size = snd_pcm_lib_buffer_bytes(substream);
chip_data->period_buf_size = snd_pcm_lib_period_bytes(substream);
It seems like those value should remain constant, and I use those values to
calculate later in my polling thread to notify of a period lapse. It's
almost like the runtime is telling me the period has changed and the buffer
size has changed. But this only happens in this case with a short wav file
and running aplay over and over quickly.
Is there a way to make sure the hw_ptr doesn't get affected by multiple
instances of aplay trying to render out small clips. It seems like maybe I
am setting up something incorrectly or maybe not blocking/ waiting
correctly.
I am at a loss in trying to figure this out, wondering if you would be so
kind as to comment on my situation. I really appreciate your time in reading
this email.
Matt
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