Writing an ALSA driver: Setting up capture

Now that we have an ALSA card initialized and registered with the middle layer we can move on to describing to ALSA our capture device. Unfortunately for anyone wishing to do playback, I will not be covering that since my device driver only provides for capture. If I end up implementing the playback feature, I will make an additional post.

So let's get started. ALSA provides a PCM API in its middle layer. We will be making use of this to register a single PCM capture device that will have a number of subdevices depending on the low level hardware I have. NOTE: All of the initialization below must be done just before the call to snd_card_register() in the last posting.

struct snd_pcm *pcm;
ret = snd_pcm_new(card, card->driver, 0, 0, nr_subdevs,
                  &pcm);
if (ret < 0)
        return ret;

In the above code we allocate a new PCM structure. We pass the card we allocated beforehand. The second argument is a name for the PCM device, which I have just conveniently set to the same name as the driver. It can be whatever you like. The third argument is the PCM device number. Since I am only allocating one, it's set to 0.

The third and fourth arguments are the number of playback and capture streams associated with this device. For my purpose, playback is 0 and capture is the number I have detected that the card supports (4, 8 or 16).

The last argument is where ALSA allocates the PCM device. It will associate any memory for this with the card, so when we later call snd_card_free(), it will cleanup our PCM device(s) as well.

Next we must associate the handlers for capturing sound data from our hardware. We have a struct defined as such:

static struct snd_pcm_ops my_pcm_ops = {
        .open      = my_pcm_open,
        .close     = my_pcm_close,
        .ioctl     = snd_pcm_lib_ioctl,
        .hw_params = my_hw_params,
        .hw_free   = my_hw_free,
        .prepare   = my_pcm_prepare,
        .trigger   = my_pcm_trigger,
        .pointer   = my_pcm_pointer,
        .copy      = my_pcm_copy,
};

I will go into the details of how to define these handlers in the next post, but for now we just want to let the PCM middle layer know to use them:

snd_pcm_set_ops(pcm, SNDRV_PCM_STREAM_CAPTURE,
                &my_pcm_ops);
pcm->private_data = mydev;
pcm->info_flags = 0;
strcpy(pcm->name, card->shortname);

Here, we first set the capture handlers for this PCM device to the one we defined above. Afterwards, we also set some basic info for the PCM device such as adding our main device as part of the private data (so that we can retrieve it more easily in the handler callbacks).

Now that we've made the device, we want to initialize the memory management associated with the PCM middle layer. ALSA provides some basic memory handling routines for various functions. We want to make use of it since it allows us to reduce the amount of code we write and makes working with userspace that much easier.

ret = snd_pcm_lib_preallocate_pages_for_all(pcm,
                     SNDRV_DMA_TYPE_CONTINUOUS,
                     snd_dma_continuous_data(GFP_KERNEL),
                     MAX_BUFFER, MAX_BUFFER);
if (ret < 0)
        return ret;

The MAX_BUFFER is something we've defined earlier and will be discussed further in the next post. Simply put, it's the maximum size of the buffer in the hardware (the maximum size of data that userspace can request at one time without waiting on the hardware to produce more data).

We are using the simple continuous buffer type here. Your hardware may support direct DMA into the buffers, and as such you would use something like snd_dma_dev() along with your PCI device to initialize this. I'm using standard buffers because my hardware will require me to handle moving data around manually.

Next post we'll actually define the hardware and the handler callbacks.

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