[linux-audio-dev] Echo Darla/Gina/Layla/... on Linux

David Olofson david at olofson.net
Mon Mar 24 08:46:01 UTC 2003


On Friday 21 March 2003 21.47, Paul Davis wrote:
[...]
> >a better interface is a generic firmware loading API (or as
> > generic as one can be made, anyway) with a userspace firmware
> > loader.
>
> agreed. its a rather tricky design however, because on a lot of
> hardware, you have to defer most of the driver initialization until
> the firmware load is complete. the h/w won't even talk to you
> "fully" until you've done this. this means you have a loaded device
> driver that is actually incapable of doing anything until a
> separate user-space application is invoked.

Just to make things more fun, it seems that Echo put some programmable 
logic in the external part of Layla. (Only the DSP is on the PCI 
card.) Problem is that the external box has it's own power supply, 
and a switch on the front panel, and may well be powered off when you 
start up the computer. If that happens, the driver must delay the 
initialization until the external box is powered on.

BTW, it took years for Echo to actually get this to work under Win32, 
and looking at the Layla driver, it seems like the whole 
initialization business with that model is a bit flaky. (Well, using 
the first few versions of the driver gave me the exact same 
impression.)

Did seem to work pretty well on Win32 last time I tried, though, so I 
believe the current driver code deals with it.


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

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