My suggestions are (pick one):
1) create one multichannel control and remove the stereo controls when the
hardware is detected (no functionality dup)
we can't remove controls that existed before, this might break userspace
It's not widely used, so it would be better to break things now than later.
rt715 has been used on CometLake-based devices for a while (1.5 years?).
But I see that others are a bit conservative.
with older UCM files that touch those ADC07 and ADC27. That's why we
The upstream UCM files don't refer to those controls.
they do, unfortunately, see ucm2/codecs/rt715/init.conf
cset "name='rt715 ADC 27 Capture Switch' 1"
cset "name='rt715 ADC 07 Capture Switch' 1"
cset "name='rt715 ADC 07 Capture Volume' 58"
added a new one, to be backwards compatible with a user updates their
kernel.
Even if you don't remove the duplicate controls, the right abstraction is more
appropriate in my eyes (better than vmaster extension). The double stereo -> 4
channel array mapping is not fully correct (vmaster, proposed patch).
The hardware exposes registers to deal with two inputs separately, they
are not duplicates. The point here is that we need a mapping to a
simpler view where those two inputs are merged logically.
2) create proper vmaster control like for HDA playback
That might be the better option. What was suggested in this patch is
essentially to introduce a layer that drives the actual controls, but it
was done 'manually' and may not follow the proper rules.
That said I know absolutely nothing about 'vmaster controls', pointers
to a typical example would be greatly appreciated.
sound/core/vmaster.c ; The ASoC core will probably require another layer to
support this?
I'll look into it.
3) wait until UCM can describe this hardware and set the DAC values manually
to a sensible value via sequences (the specific hardware levels can be set
using the conditions in UCM)
Not an option, there are products that need to ship soon.
It's the easiest method for now. It's just about to change the UCM files
without any other changes in the kernel / user space. It's heavily used for
SST drivers, isn't?
The current UCM upstream modifies only SOF volume levels (PGA Master Capture).
that's not right, see above.
I may have misunderstood your point for 3). I assumed you'd need a
description coming from the kernel, as we did before for the components
(cfg-mics, etc). How would UCM know which of the controls to use without
any change to the kernel?