Re: [ibm-acpi-devel] Adding a alsa mixer interface to ibm-acpi

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Mon, 26 Feb 2007 23:14:02 -0300,
Henrique de Moraes Holschuh wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 26 Feb 2007, Theodore Tso wrote:
> > thinkpad's real sound card.  Otherwise sound applications will have no
> > idea that this separate mixer-only sound card has anything to do with
> > the main speaker output (as compared to the Skype headset I have
> > plugged into the USB port). 
> 
> True.  That's the downside.   The upside is that we don't need to create a
> new API to allow the piggy-back.  After all, the real soundcard module could
> get loaded *after* ibm-acpi... or it could be removed before ibm-acpi.  The
> "piggy-back mixer control" would need an API with full hotplug semanthics.

Well, it's a question whether this should be an add-on module or a
built-in to the sound driver.  From the usability viewpoint, the
latter is much easier.  Then we have no module loading order problem
and need no API extension.  Of course, the drawback is that the
unnecessary growth of the code / binary size for non-thinkpad users.

> > I suppose it does mean you can use alsamixer to manipulate the sound,
> > but from the user's point of view, if it's not visible when they right
> > clock on the mixer applet (because it's not associated with the
> > laptop's primary sound card), is it really that useful?
> 
> If they got a mixer applet worth something, it will list two cards, or allow
> them to have two instances, one for each card.

I guess it's rather confusing.  Both controls the very same device for
the very same role in the end, so it'd be better to be merged in some
level, IMO.


Takashi

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