Update on the CEC API

[Hans Verkuil]

On Mon October 8 2012 17:06:20 Florian Fainelli wrote:
> Hi Hans,
> 
> On Thursday 27 September 2012 16:33:30 Hans Verkuil wrote:
> > Hi all,
> > 
> > During the Linux Plumbers Conference we (i.e. V4L2 and DRM developers) had a
> > discussion on how to handle the CEC protocol that's part of the HDMI 
> standard.
> > 
> > The decision was made to create a CEC bus with CEC clients, each represented
> > by a /dev/cecX device. So this is independent of the V4L or DRM APIs. 
> > 
> > In addition interested subsystems (alsa for the Audio Return Channel, and
> > possibly networking as well for ethernet over HDMI) can intercept/send CEC
> > messages as well if needed. Particularly for the CEC additions made in
> > HDMI 1.4a it is no longer possible to handle the CEC protocol completely in
> > userspace, but part of the intelligence has to be moved to kernelspace.
> 
> What kind of "intelligence" are you talking about? I see nothing in HDMI 1.4a 
> or earlier that requires doing stuff in kernelspace besides managing control to 
> the hardware, but I might be missing something.

Most notably: handling the new hotplug message. That's something that kernel
drivers need to know. Some ARC messages might be relevant for ALSA drivers as
well, but I need to look into those more carefully.

Also remote control messages might optionally be handled through an input driver.

> In my opinion ARC is just a control mechanism, and can be dealt with in user-
> space, since you really want to just have hints about when ARC is 
> enabled/disabled to take appropriate actions on the audio outputs or your 
> system.
> 
> > 
> > I've started working on this API but I am still at the stage of playing
> > around with it and thinking about the best way this functionality should
> > be exposed. At least I managed to get the first CEC packets transferred
> > today :-)
> > 
> > It will probably be a few weeks before I post something, but in the meantime
> > if you want to use CEC and have certain requirements that need to be met,
> > please let me know. If only so that I can be certain I haven't forgotten
> > anything.
> 
> Here is my wish-list, if I may:
> - allow for a CEC adapter to be in "detached" / "attached" mode, particularly 
> useful if the hardware doing CEC can process a basic set of messages to act a 
> a global wake-up source for the system

I have hardware that can do that, so I want to look into supporting this.

> - allow for a CEC adapter to define several receive modes: unicast and 
> "promiscuous", which is useful for dumping the CEC bus messages

I don't think I have hardware for that, but it shouldn't be difficult to add.

> - make the CEC adapter API asynchronous for the data path, so it is easy for a 
> driver to report completion of a successfully transmitted/received CEC frame

Already done.

Regards,

	Hans