Re: AT32 ASoC Driver Patches on alsa-devel

[Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de>]

At Thu, 5 Jun 2008 19:06:57 +0200,
Haavard Skinnemoen wrote:
> 
> Takashi Iwai <tiwai@suse.de> wrote:
> > Of course, important.  And it's actually done in a different way...
> [...]
> > Of course, important.  And it's actually done in a different way...
> 
> But why?
> 
> > Ideally, more fusion would be possible, but practically it's not
> > always worth.  I don't think you want to merge codes between ext3 and
> > reiserfs although both have similar "design goals" :)
> 
> Still, both plug into the same VFS layer...

Read as ALSA is VFS layer and ASoC is ext3 while another sound driver
is reiserfs (or vice versa).  Both have journals.  Then would you ask
why ext3 doesn't reuse the journal codes of reiserfs?  Or, do you
suggest to add journal codes into VFS layer?

Of course, the situation is different than fs.  The fact is that both
ASoC and other drivers have been developed in a parallel way although
both use ALSA as backends.

ASoC is a higher and easier abstraction layer specific for the mobile
devices and it has the features like power-saving in its middle
layer.  The ASoC drivers are top layers over ASoC over ALSA.

Meanwhile, other ALSA drivers directly communicate with ALSA layer.
Some of them have similar features like ASoC, but it doesn't use ASoC
code because it was implemented before ASoC and differently from
ASoC.


> Reiser4 tried to invent its own plugin system. IIRC that didn't fly
> particularly well.

ASoC is just a middle layer.  Not comparable with plugins.


Takashi