[alsa-devel] [PATCH 2/4] ASoC: mmp: add audio dma support

[linux@arm.linux.org.uk (Russell King - ARM Linux)]

On Fri, May 25, 2012 at 04:47:20PM +0800, zhangfei gao wrote:
> Do you mean at open time, like snd_dmaengine_pcm_open.
> The channel resource is limited and better get dynamically.
> As a  result the pcm_new and preallocate already called before.

This is where dealing with slave DMA channels in a virtualized setup
becomes a far better solution than trying to assign a particular
physical channel at request time.

What we may wish to think about is having a way for slave drivers to
assert to DMA engine the priority of a channel, which they can change
dynamically according to what they're doing.  Eg, an ALSA driver would
leave the channel low priority while it's not expecting to be used, but
as soon as we see the prepare call, set it to high priority.

The DMA engine driver could use that to decide to assign a physical
channel to the virtual channel, so that DMA can start as soon as
possible even with other activity on the DMA engine.

However, I've yet to see any setup where the number of physical DMA
channels available exceeds the number of actual _simultaneous_ users.
Even with the five channels on SA11x0 shared between 12? peripherals,
with my DMA engine driver I've only seen one or two physical channels
being used simultaneously.