Re: [LAU] No more PCI!

Paul Davis wrote: Don't worry, we have already been communicating on this. I think its not a bad idea to take things one step at a time. The FFADO codebase is not really an example of elegance. It bears several signs of a learning process, is (therefore) massively over-engineered, and is certainly not suitable for kernel space (e.g. is C++, uses floats). Furthermore the new firewire kernel stack presents an API that is much better suited for bi-directional low-latency streaming. The current FFADO streaming engine tries to work around the limitations of the old stack, but as a result its architecture is not suited for the new stack's API. So a "move" of the streaming part of FFADO degenerates into a re-write anyway. And rewriting just what is needed to discover the audiofire is a better idea than trying to use FFADO for discovery from the start as the audiofire discovery code can be fairly straightforward. Once an ALSA streaming driver is available for the audiofire, it will not be too difficult to adapt it such that it uses FFADO for device discovery. This should make it work with all devices that use IEC61883/AMDTP streaming (i.e. bebob, dice and oxford based devices). I'm already restructuring the FFADO codebase to support an external streaming engine. This should make it easy to glue things together once the kernel driver is ready. In any case I'm pretty happy that someone with ALSA experience takes on the task of writing a kernel driver, because if I have to do it it would probably take another two years. Greets, Pieter PS: An ALSA driver for firewire devices will solve quite some issues with respect to user experience and compatibility. Nevertheless I'm personally still inclined to maintain and improve the userspace jack streaming engine, and also port it to the new firewire stack. I'm not convinced that things like hot-plugging, device aggregation and sample-accurate midi will be easy to implement using jack->ALSA->firewire. So maybe you should worry more about the confusion that might cause...