[pulseaudio-discuss] ASoC and pulseaudio

[Carlo Caione]

Hi,
In our daily work we are seeing more and more laptops coming in with
SoC audio (ASoC). In the most recent case, we are working with a new
consumer laptop based on Intel Cherry Trail. As you probably know to
have audio working on these laptops / codecs a fairly lengthy hw
specific mixer configuration is needed.
The problem we are facing is how to ship a single PA / ALSA package
containing a working configuration for several of those laptops and we
were wondering what is the most correct / upstream-friendly way to do
that.

I'm already excluding here some trivial workarounds like: shipping a
different PA package for each hw or using an hw-tailored script to
load the correct ALSA configuration.

The first solution we came up with is just to write a profile-set
configuration file loaded by udev for each cards / laptop with the
correct mixer configuration already embedded in the path configuration
files. This looks a bit like an overkill when you have to change tens
of controls most of which just one time (once you have setup the codec
selecting the main path is usually just matter of changing a few
controls to change the output / input path).

Another possibility is to use UCM and let PA create automatically from
that profile and path configuration files. This looks promising but we
were a bit worried about the UCM support in PA and how stable/adopted
is UCM itself.

So, what is the suggested way to accomplish this and in general how PA
is trying to address this problem? I expect in the future to see many
more ASoC coming into the laptops world, how will the community make
it so that you install a distro and then sound "just works"?


-- 
Carlo Caione  |  +39.340.80.30.096  |  Endless