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Currently x86 platforms use the PCM status/control mmaps for transferring the PCM status and appl_ptr between kernel and user-spaces. The mmap is a most efficient way of communication, but it has a drawback per its nature, namely, it can't notify the change explicitly to kernel. The lack of appl_ptr update notification is a problem on a few existing drivers, but it's mostly a small issue and negligible. However, a new type of driver that uses DSP for a deep buffer management requires the exact position of appl_ptr for calculating the buffer prefetch size, and the asynchronous appl_ptr update between kernel and user-spaces becomes a significant problem for it. How can we enforce user-space to report the appl_ptr update? The way is relatively simple. Just by disabling the PCM control mmap, the user-space is supposed to fall back to the mode using SYNC_PTR ioctl, and the kernel gets control over that. This fallback mode is used in all non-x86 platforms as default, and also in the 32bit compatible model on all platforms including x86. It's been implemented already over a decade, so we can say it's fairly safe and stably working. With the help of the knowledge above, this patch introduces a new PCM info flag SNDRV_PCM_INFO_SYNC_APPLPTR for achieving the appl_ptr sync from user-space. When a driver sets this flag at open, the PCM status / control mmap is disabled, which effectively switches to SYNC_PTR mode in user-space side. In this version, both PCM status and control mmaps are disabled although only the latter, control mmap, is the target. It's because the current alsa-lib implementation supposes that both status and control mmaps are always coupled, thus it handles a fatal error when only one of them fails. Of course, the disablement of the status/control mmaps may bring a slight performance overhead. Thus, as of now, this should be used only for the dedicated devices that deserves. Note that the disablement of mmap is a sort of workaround. In the later patch, we'll introduce the way to identify the protocol version alsa-lib supports, and keep mmap working while the sync_ptr is performed together. Reviewed-by: Takashi Sakamoto <o-takashi@sakamocchi.jp> Signed-off-by: Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>
Linux kernel ============ This file was moved to Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst Please notice that there are several guides for kernel developers and users. These guides can be rendered in a number of formats, like HTML and PDF. In order to build the documentation, use ``make htmldocs`` or ``make pdfdocs``. There are various text files in the Documentation/ subdirectory, several of them using the Restructured Text markup notation. See Documentation/00-INDEX for a list of what is contained in each file. Please read the Documentation/process/changes.rst file, as it contains the requirements for building and running the kernel, and information about the problems which may result by upgrading your kernel.