Sound support for poodle/2.6

OpenZaurus team July 12th, 2006

Yesterday Richard ‘RP’ Purdie (our master kernel hacker) got sound working on poodle under 2.6.17 kernel.

Richard’s mail sent to OpenEmbedded mailing list:

I should mention how pleased I am with ASoC. I’ll describe the development this support took as I can’t quite believe it:

Last night, I made a copy of the corgi.c machine driver in ASoC and called it poodle.c. They’re similar but different enough to need its own file. I went through editing the differences between corgi and poodle. The main problem was that it uses locomo, not scoop and calling locomo gpios proved difficult with the existing infrastructure. Figuring out how to call the locomo gpio code was the most time consuming part.

I built it and tried to run it on the device but the kernel keymap changes conflicted with the elderly gpe image on the device and broke the keyboard, my serial lead didn’t work and basically, I couldn’t test anything.

Today I built a bootstrap image and tonight, I loaded the kernel, ASoC modules and some audio test files. I tried to modprobe and found I’d not exported the locomo gpio symbols. I reflashed, modprobed and tried to play something - no errors but no sound so I loaded the mixer. I unmuted a few things and sidetone from the inbuilt poodle mic appeared on the headphones. I tried to play an audio file and and it all just worked! I still can’t quite believe it. The only thing that doesn’t work is the internal speaker control and this is a problem shared by corgi so I’m not too worried about it.

As far as kernel development goes, that has to be the easiest driver I’ve ever written and I never thought I’d say that about a sound driver!

Liam: Thanks for ASoC :)

Liam is the author of ASoC (although Richard has played a part in its development and a lot of testing has been done on the Zaurus). ASoC is the ALSA System on Chip audio layer, a project aiming to provide sound support for SoC devices and to simplify audio driver writing by isolating the driver into platform, codec and machine layers. ASoC provides all the Zaurus sound drivers under the 2.6 kernel.

9 Responses to “Sound support for poodle/2.6”

  1. # Russmanon 12 Jul 2006 at 15:09

    Cool!

  2. # Mike Arthuron 14 Jul 2006 at 10:12

    Liam is a noob! I’m the real author of ASoC.

  3. # foomanon 17 Jul 2006 at 04:00

    This is great. Is there somewhere to download a binary of the poodle 2.6.17 kernel with sound?

  4. # BROseon 17 Jul 2006 at 18:51

    Man can’t wait, think i mite change from Watapon, maybe….

  5. # coredumpon 18 Jul 2006 at 21:24

    The latest image from here: http://hentges.net/tmp/Poodle-Kernel-2.6/
    is using the new 2.6.17 kernel and has working sound.

  6. # dumolon 22 Jul 2006 at 21:04

    Great, great, great! Let’s get rid of the 2.4-18-crapix kernel…

  7. # Helgeon 23 Jul 2006 at 14:59

    Thanks Richard, and thanks coredump to provide test-images on hentges.net! But, do you think you could add wifi-drivers to your images as well ? This would make testing much easier…

  8. # BROseon 26 Jul 2006 at 04:25

    Well I made the switch, ouch, no sound! Would like differnt network app also, so I can get on line. Just get me online and sound and it will be a World beater!

  9. # Dow Hurston 21 Aug 2006 at 05:31

    I’ve loaded on my Poodle the GPE image with sound and 2.6.17. I can hear the test sound just fine. Weird static sounds emanate though during initial login and when playing with the applet volume and the test sound. I’m able to control volume with the alsamixer.
    Dow