[pulseaudio-discuss] Problems with pulseaudio / asla on PS3

[Kevin Gilbert]

On Thu, 28 Aug 2008, Lennart Poettering opined:
> On Thu, 28.08.08 07:29, Kevin Gilbert (kevin952 at tpg.com.au) wrote:
> > D: module-alsa-sink.c: Thread starting up
> > D: rtpoll.c: Acquired POSIX realtime signal SIGRTMIN+29
> > E: module-alsa-sink.c: Assertion '(areas[0].step >> 3) == u->frame_size'
> > failed at modules/module-alsa-sink.c:177, function mmap_write().
> > Aborting. === end ===
>
> Umpf. there seems to be something very broken here in the audio driver
> or alsa-libs. We only support interleaved channels. This assert above
> is always true for interleaved channels. We ask the ALSA driver for
> interleaved channels. But apparently it gave us some more complex
> channel arrangement.
>
> Please report to the ALSA people. But first try to update your kernel
> driver and alsa-libs to newest from upstream.

Before reporting to the ALSA folk I thought I should check with the PS3 kernel 
people as I am running one of their kernels (no use reporting a problem to 
ALSA if there is PS3 kernel specific code that could be the problem).

See http://ozlabs.org/pipermail/cbe-oss-dev/2008-August/005423.html for that 
thread.

In short:

"PS3 sound driver supports only SNDRV_PCM_INFO_NONINTERLEAVED format as well 
as many ALSA driver like AC97 support only SNDRV_PCM_INFO_INTERLEAVED. Non-
interleaved format is just not usual, but it is not broken. It's defined in 
ALSA. With a brief looking, other mainlined drivers -- gus, emu10k, es1968, 
rme9652 and aica -- seem to support only non-interleaved samples. [...] PS3 
sound chip's hardware is not suitable for the interleaved samples due to its 
FIFO and DMAC design. I have no plan to support interleave permutation in the 
kernel driver level. I think the best way is that the user space renderer 
takes care of the various interleave formats as well as sample endianness and 
bit width."

I stress that this is an edited version of their response. Before I follow up 
with the ALSA people, I thought I should get an opinion from here first. So...

Cheers,
Kevin