Skinny (and very skinny) digital packaging

Skinny (and very skinny) digital packaging

[Philip Prindeville]

As more and more hardware supports digital input and/or output
(more often output than input), I was wondering if it makes sense
to offer a build/packaging option of "skinny digital", which would
entail omitting all of the analogue portions of the driver, the
config files, and the various utilities (or the utilities could detect that
no analogue hardware support is present and simply disable it).

The idea being that if someone wanted to have a bare bones (pardon
the pun) installation that supported digital output only (or digital
input and output) with no need for analogue mixing or analogue
source routing, then they could do so with a minimum configuration.
Why?  Well, the less there is to configure, the less that can go wrong...
and since all digital media (CD, DVD, digital satellite tuners, ATSC,
etc) is more and more common, people probably have little or no need
for analogue functionality these days.

So the installer portions of the makefiles would need to be changed
to understand a digital only install, the source configuration files
could be tweaked to allow preprocessing via m4 or cpp, and the
drivers and libraries could be made conditional to omit the code
that handles analogue functionality.

Initialization too might need to change the default settings to be
digital...

What does everyone think?  Comments?  Am I off in left field?

Thanks,

-Philip



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Re: Skinny (and very skinny) digital packaging

[Tehn Yit Chin]

Hi Philip,

I would be interested in something like this in ALSA. As an example, 
most of our embedded devices only have a PCM playback at one volume 
setting, so I only really need the PCM playback, none of the mixing or 
capturing or analogue partions etc of ALSA.

Also our embedded devices are usually resource limited, so smaller is 
better for us.

I understand that your idea surrounds only the digital portion of ALSA, 
but I think that the idea can be extended to the rest of ALSA's components.

cheers,
Tehn Yit Chin

Philip Prindeville wrote:

> As more and more hardware supports digital input and/or output
> (more often output than input), I was wondering if it makes sense
> to offer a build/packaging option of "skinny digital", which would
> entail omitting all of the analogue portions of the driver, the
> config files, and the various utilities (or the utilities could detect 
> that
> no analogue hardware support is present and simply disable it).
>
> The idea being that if someone wanted to have a bare bones (pardon
> the pun) installation that supported digital output only (or digital
> input and output) with no need for analogue mixing or analogue
> source routing, then they could do so with a minimum configuration.
> Why?  Well, the less there is to configure, the less that can go wrong...
> and since all digital media (CD, DVD, digital satellite tuners, ATSC,
> etc) is more and more common, people probably have little or no need
> for analogue functionality these days.
>
> So the installer portions of the makefiles would need to be changed
> to understand a digital only install, the source configuration files
> could be tweaked to allow preprocessing via m4 or cpp, and the
> drivers and libraries could be made conditional to omit the code
> that handles analogue functionality.
>
> Initialization too might need to change the default settings to be
> digital...
>
> What does everyone think?  Comments?  Am I off in left field?
>
> Thanks,
>
> -Philip
>
>
>
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>


-- 
Tehn Yit Chin
Software Engineer, Grey Innovation Pty. Ltd.



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Re: Skinny (and very skinny) digital packaging

[Takashi Iwai]

At Wed, 10 Aug 2005 09:09:13 +1000,
Tehn Yit Chin wrote:
> 
> Hi Philip,
> 
> I would be interested in something like this in ALSA. As an example, 
> most of our embedded devices only have a PCM playback at one volume 
> setting, so I only really need the PCM playback, none of the mixing or 
> capturing or analogue partions etc of ALSA.

It's a bit difficult to do this in a general way.
You can easily strip down the mixer components by commenting out the
relevant codes.  But providing this as generic config options makes
things complicated.  And the dynamic configuration (e.g. over
proc/sysfs) doesn't make sense for the resource reduction.

Anyway, examples of desired configurations would be appreciated -
e.g. which component is necessary and what mixer controls are needed,
etc.  Then we can discuss how to define driver configurations in a
genric form.


> Also our embedded devices are usually resource limited, so smaller is 
> better for us.

I understand well about this.  We can diet many stuff, especially
alsa-lib and many of PCM codes, too.


Takashi


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Re: Skinny (and very skinny) digital packaging

[Takashi Iwai]

At Tue, 09 Aug 2005 16:09:50 -0600,
Philip Prindeville wrote:
> 
> As more and more hardware supports digital input and/or output
> (more often output than input), I was wondering if it makes sense
> to offer a build/packaging option of "skinny digital", which would
> entail omitting all of the analogue portions of the driver, the
> config files, and the various utilities (or the utilities could detect that
> no analogue hardware support is present and simply disable it).
> 
> The idea being that if someone wanted to have a bare bones (pardon
> the pun) installation that supported digital output only (or digital
> input and output) with no need for analogue mixing or analogue
> source routing, then they could do so with a minimum configuration.
> Why?  Well, the less there is to configure, the less that can go wrong...
> and since all digital media (CD, DVD, digital satellite tuners, ATSC,
> etc) is more and more common, people probably have little or no need
> for analogue functionality these days.

I don't think the analog will go away at all but I understand your
proposal.

> So the installer portions of the makefiles would need to be changed
> to understand a digital only install, the source configuration files
> could be tweaked to allow preprocessing via m4 or cpp, and the
> drivers and libraries could be made conditional to omit the code
> that handles analogue functionality.
> 
> Initialization too might need to change the default settings to be
> digital...
> 
> What does everyone think?  Comments?  Am I off in left field?

My idea is different.  We may provide presets of PCM/mixer/whatever
runtime configurations rather than compile-time one.  It's just like
defining your own ~/.asoundrc but in the system-wide way.

The requirement for embedded systems is of course different.  We need
to do more diet.  But, only for usability, the runtime configuration
would be a better choice, I guess.


Takashi


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SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO
September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices
Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA
Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf