Re: future ALSA development

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Thu, 3 Jul 2003 18:05:08 +0200 (CEST),
Thomas Charbonnel wrote:
> 
> > Hello all,
> >
> > 	here are my next goals for the ALSA library development (short
> > term). I invite all developers to comment these directions.
> >
> 
> [...]
> 
> > * initiate a development of a graphical tool which will manage
> >   the alsa configuration files (~/.asoundrc)
> >   - we need a rapid development tool; I slowly became a fan of python
> > and
> >     Qt has rich number of widgets; python + PyQt seems to me a good idea
> >   - using python requires to write a GPLed ALSA 0.9 -> python wrapper
> >
> 
> One point I would like to bring to focus is how sound hardware state
> persistance is dealt with. The limits of alsactl are showing up with
> hardware like the hdsp, were the card might not be fully initialized (or
> not even present yet, e.g. cardbus) at boot time. We're more and more
> likely to have to deal with such external hotpluggable devices (pcmcia,
> firewire, usb), where full initialization can happen any time after the
> boot process, and we can't expect the average user to be scripting around.
> 
> IMHO state restoration could be :
> * triggered by the driver, at the appropriate time, depending maybe on
> some system configuration options.

it would be feasible only if we have a certain daemon.
otherwise, i don't think its a good style to invoke a user-space tool
from the kernel driver.

> * initiated by the user, through the configuration GUI.
 
or: more clever hotplug scripts.

basically, the whole initialization stuff for such dynamic devices is
the job of hotplug manager.  so, we can provide a proper init/delete
script for each card.  e.g. loading the firmware, then set up the
default or restore the last status.

but yes, for this way, it would be nice to have a "state", so that
alsactl can know whether the data to restore matches with the current
state.  in this way, the unmatching data can be ignored by the first
call of alsactl in the init script.


Takashi



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