Getting ARM/WM8350 audio and power management working in linux - linux

I have a rooted Sony prs900, running a linux 2.6.23 #2 PREEMPT kernel, for ARMv6. (Montavista linux kernel). I'm having problems with figuring out how power management works, both for running the system and for powering up and down the audio port.
I can neither figure out how to read the battery/powerline status information, nor get the audio chip to play sound, etc ... although I have been studying the kernel modules for a while...
It's worth a little money for help, say $100 paypal donation to an email account, (or more if this takes a long time...) for the first person able to explain to me how to do them in a way that works.
Eg: read battery status, and change some power modes like getting the audio amplifiers to power up/down so that the audio played to /dev/dsp (oss emulation) actually comes out as sound rather than just being consumed by the chip and ignored...
The actual sony kernel, and binary packages of cross compiler tools are located on the main page. Actual kernel sourcecode is also available.
What I have learned so far myself :
The sony is using a wolfson micro WM8350 audio driver and battery charger/power management chip for all the system's power; eg: it can power down/up the SD memory cards, send more power to the cpu, power up audio amplifiers, etc. See: WM8350 Datasheet.
Pretty much, the whole problem revolves around getting the WM8350 kernel drivers to work...
Although the company brags quite a bit about it's support under linux, they don't have any application notes or examples that are actually helpful that I can find, other than the datasheet. I suspect the kernel drivers I have are beta code, because they don't seem to be behaving well (several error messages in the kernel log about wm8350 registers not being readable happen at every boot even when running only the sony's native software...).
The kernel driver's source-code of most interest are in: linux-2.6.23_091126/drivers/mxc/pmic/{core,wm8350}
Notice, the wm8350 is a competitor to the MC14783, but the linux kernel drivers use the same {core} driver source code for both chips; The sony ONLY has the wm8350 on it -- there is no MC14783 present.
The code that I most want most desperately to understand how to make operate is found in the subdirectory {wm8350}, eg: wm8350/wm8350pm/power_supply_sysfs.c.
I want the audio to fire up too, but 'm not quite sure where the pertinent audio amplifier code is yet...
Very clearly the wm8350pm code is designed to export a /sys directory interface; right now /sys is mounted and operational on the system; but I'm not very familiar with the semantics of these newer style interfaces... they aren't quite like the old APM power interfaces for Linux laptops...
First I checked the obvious:
If I do a "cat /sys/power/state" it returns the word "mem" and nothing else.
The file has permissions -rw-r--r--, so potentially it could be written -- but I don't know with what. The string "mem" does not exist anywhere in the source code for the wm8350pm drivers, so I don't even know if /sys/power/state is part of the source code.
Doing a find /sys -iname "wm8350" reveals a handful of directories with the patterns:
wm8350-rtc , wm8350-pmic , wm8350-bl , wm8350-power , wm8350-led
wm8350-hifi-dai , wm8350-codec
wm8350-imx32ads.0
So, I do an ls-l on each directory, and look for actual files rather than symbolic links or subdirectories, and what I find are stock useless writable files: bind, unbind, uevent,
and a very few read only files: pmic_reg, dapm_widget, modalias, codec_reg which aren't very helpful.
It's no surprise that:
Doing: cat /sys/devices/platform/wm8350-ebx5016-audi/modalias gives "wm8350-ebx5016-audio"
Doing: cat /sys/devices/platform/wm8350-imx32ads.0/modalias gives "wm8350-imx32ads"
and since audio is off... Doing: cat /sys/devices/platform/wm8350-ebx5016-audi/dapm_widget reveals the audio state:
Headphone Jack: Off
Line In Jack: On
Mic Bias: Off
Left DAC: Off
Right DAC: Off
... (all else off and omitted except )...
EBX5016-hifi: PM State: D3hot
The last two files, I expect should do wm8350 chip register dumps... and one did.
Doing: cat /sys/devices/wm8350-pmic/pmic-reg causes a long pause, then nothing is printed.
but:
Doing: cat /sys/devices/wm8350/platform/wm8350-ebx5016-audi/wm8350-codec/codec_reg does prints a list of registers up to e8 which is just a few bytes larger than the datasheet says the chip should be (0x00 to 0xe6).
I tried using a python program to play wav files, (works on my desktop computer), and I noticed that /dev/dsp does open, the mixers DO set volume levels, and nothing comes out. So -- the audio driver is not able to enable the sound amplifiers on it's own automatically.
There are no alsa sound files in /dev, nor are any alsa tools found on the embedded machine... so I assume Sony is strictly using OSS /dev/dsp and /dev/mixer.
There is only one other access point I can find to the ws8350:
There IS a device driver /dev/wm8350.
That driver created by the source code in subdirectory wm8350/wm8350_reg.c ; in theory it should be able to read and write to all registers using ioctls() calls from a user space. However, something appears grossly wrong with it, for I wrote a test program to read the wm8350 registers... and most of the registers return error messages rather than allowing to be read, including the most pulic ID registers (0x00, 0x01) etc.
So, I'm quite stuck. Pointers, thoughts, hints, are quite desired.

I would like to change your question a little bit.
How does Linux ASOC (alsa system on chip) power management work?
I will answer this and then give some hints on using this specific chip.
.. If I do a cat /sys/power/state it returns the word "mem" and nothing else. The file has permissions -rw-r--r--, so potentially it could be written -- but I don't know with what. The string "mem" does not exist anywhere in the source code for the wm8350pm drivers, so I don't even know if /sys/power/state is part of the source code.
You need to get an understanding of the Linux driver model. Hardware in Linux is structured like a tree. The rational is that things must be powered up/down in specific sequences. For instance, you should not power down the PCI bus controller before powering down the PCI peripherals. Linux builds a tree of hardware and each driver (code) and device (data/actual hardware) has specific call backs/function pointers which handle some specific tasks.
probe - Are you there? Determines actual hardware/device is present.
remove - Shuts down device. Module removal, power off, etc.
suspend - going to sleep.
resume - waking up.
Three and four may look interesting to you. Now, to read about what /sys/power/state is about. The text mem, means that suspend to memory is supported by your system. In this mode, Linux does these steps,
Find first lowest level active bus.
suspend devices on that bus.
suspend bus and de-activate.
If a bus is active go to step 1.
Set CPU to low power state (suspend to RAM).
This is not quite the full story. A few devices may support a wake-up. They will have extra call-backs to enable waking the system from sleep modes. Read the documentation to find out about this.
That is general power management and driver/device structure. Now, how is the ASOC (alsa system on chip) structured?
There are typically three drivers/devices that get stitched together.
Codec - The wm8350 in your case. This includes audio amplifier drive circuitry and can include sound mixing and source controls. Supports digital to analog and analog to digital, typically through an i2s interface. The i2s is not the only interface. Usually a register bank is controlled through a secondary interface; i2c in the wm8350 case.
DAI - Refer to chapter 1.2.18.1 of the iMx31 reference manual; the hardware is called the SSI by Freescale. The next chapter on the AUDMUX is also useful to understand audio support on the iMx31/32.
Machine file - this is the board specific routing. It hooks the DAI to the codec and is the parent of both. It provides board clocking information and other specific configuration. For instance, it may use the AUDMUX to route the physical pins to the SSI block.
An i2c (or SPI) interface from the codec driver to send control commands to the coded chip. Some chips might uses a wacky i2s interface or something else for control (but not in your case).
Now if you understood this, you will see that some features of the wm8350 seem to break the Linux model. The DAI interface can be stopped (digital audio), but the i2c interface must remain alive to program the registers related to the power functionality in the codec/PMIC (power management IC).
The latest WM8350 calls the IC a multi-function device and support was introduced in 2.6.35. The initial support may not have included the WM8350 features. Unfortunately, without some details on the layout of the Sony prs900 board, it would be difficult to know how to use the WM8350 PMIC functionality. The code will involve the iMx31 CPU, the WM8350, the i2c connection, and possibly some power supply circuitry.
For certain, you can just try echo mem > /sys/power/state and see what happens. If it works, you are lucky. The power/current consumption in sleep might not be optimal, but it will probably be hard to fix with the 2.6.23 kernel. You will want to look through the /sys directories for wake-up sources and possibly register these before issuing the suspend to memory command.
I can neither figure out how to read the battery/powerline status information, nor get the audio chip to play sound, etc ... although I have been studying the kernel modules for a while...
From the above discussions, the battery and powerline status will probably be found through another device. However, the pmic_reg file may actually give the status if things are connected properly on the board.
The audio chip will use ALSA. You need to use either alsamixer or the command line amixer to set up audio routes through the codec, so the DAI channel (PCM from iMx32) is routed and sent to the speaker. To minimize power consumption, things are usually turned off by default. The /dev/dsp files are just OSS compatibility. This configuration will support ALSA natively. You are better off to use ALSA if possible.
Donate to the OSF and get a tax receipt, if this was helpful enough.

Related

Dumping hardware state of an Intel HD Audio hardware

Is there a way to fully dump the configuration of an Intel HDA-based audio codec, including current hardware state?
The interface at /proc/asound/card0/codec#0 only reflects what's known to the kernel, not the real hardware state.
The PCI configuration space (read with lspci -x) doesn't show much (it doesn't even show volume/amplifier gain values).
For context : I'm trying to debug an audio issue with my laptop, where headphones output white noise when resuming from standby. The white noise doesn't change when increasing volume, but disappears only when powering down the codec.
This leads me to believe that the issue is likely caused by either a buggy ACPI or a change in the codec's configuration, or even both. My goal is to get as much data as I can on before/after states and compare them, but both methods described above failed for me.
I found that hdajackretask as part of the alsa-tools-gui package on my Debian Stretch GNU/Linux Os looks very interesting in getting the internal parts of the sound-card in the right configuration for what I wanted.
I'm just looking to see whether it is portable to my other OS as I have only seem to have stereo audio on FreeBSD and I think this would help. In your case it might help your to decode how things are configured and to spot any changes. The normal screen is at least helpful in determining which connection is which:
What looks more interesting is the "Advanced override":
I am about to reboot and see whether I have managed to turn the grey connector be the "side"-channel outputs....

PCIe device discovery algorithm pseudo code

I have a PCIe model written in System Verilog, although I think this question is language agnostic. The model performs PCIe configuration reads and writes and memory reads and writes perfectly in simulation. However, what I need to do is "discover" my PCIe device and configure my config space registers in simulation. Is there a boiler plate chunk of pseudo code that represents the Linux PCIe enumeration process that I can just add my own models transactions functions too so that I can get a "Bus walk", followed by BAR programming, SR-IOV enable if discovered, MSIx config? It seems like this would be a common exercise for PCIe device so maybe there is model.
It isn't terribly difficult to do. Basically you loop through the config space, checking for each each possible device on the first root bus 0. When a device is found, you allocate a memory space for it based on its requested size and program the BARs accordingly. If you find any bridges, you also configure and enable them - the basic bridge registers for this are standard. This includes assigning the upstream and downstream bus numbers, which then allows you to enumerate the new downstream bus, and so on.
I had to do this once to access a PCI I/O card on a system that had no OS or other software environment. It wasn't too bad and that was across two bridges from two vendors, as well as the I/O card registers and the CPU bus root bridge setup. This was PCI, not PCIe, but it would be very much the same. You could even do it with completely hard-coded numbers if the hardware never changed, but in my case there were a couple variants so I actually had to do some simple enumeration to find the device numbers dynamically. One gotcha is that you may have to delay a bit, or retry, to give all the devices time to come online before you try to access them.
In doing that I found this book to be invaluable: PCI System Architecture (4th Edition). I notice there is also an version for PCIe: PCI Express System Architecture (1st Edition). I would definitely get one of those if you haven't already. These books contain detailed algorithms and explanations about how to do all of this. At the time I didn't really use or refer to any code to speak of, but...
The best code resource I have found is U-Boot. It operates at a similarly low-level and is totally self contained and is still fairly small and as simple as possible. For example, the enumeration appears to start with the function pci_init() calls a board specific pci_xxx_init(). This then sets up the root bridge and then calls pci_hose_scan_bus() in drivers/pci/pci.c to do the real work. Also check out the routines in drivers/pci/pci_auto.c, as well as the rest of the folder.
For your task you probably only need a very small subset and could just hack out parts of these files into a simple driver. Basically a for() loop and some pci_read/write_config() calls with logic to recognize your device and bridge IDs.

Linux: access i2c device within board_init function

(iMX6 SOC running Linux 3.0)
I need to run a few I2C transactions in my board_init function. I tried calling i2c_get_adapter, then i2c_transfer, those being available in kernel mode, but i2c_get_adapter returns NULL. It's already called imx6q_add_imx_i2c, which is a wrapper around platform_device_register_full, but that isn't enough.
I can manipulate GPIO in board_init by calling gpio_request to obtain access, and gpio_free at the end. Is there something analogous to those functions for i2c?
--- added details ---
I've got a LAN9500A USB 100Base-T Ethernet MAC connected to a LAN9303 3-port switch with a virtual PHY. The MAC has a GPIO reset line that has to be turned off before it will spring to life and enumerate on the USB. That's done in board_init because it's completely nonstandard, so we don't want to patch the stock driver to manipulate some GPIO that's not part of the device.
The problem I'm having is that even though the MAC is permanently attached to the VPHY, it's not noticing it's connected, and an "ip link show eth1" command shows NO-CARRIER. I found I can kickstart it by unmasking the VPHY's Device Ready interrupt via I2C, but I also have to mask it immediately, or I get infinite interrupts. That's not the right solution, but Microchip has been no help in showing me a better way. But we don't want to patch the MAC driver with code to fiddle with the PHY.
There is no PHY driver for this part, and the MII interface to the VPHY doesn't include any interrupt-related registers, so it must be done through I2C. Writing a PHY driver just to flip a bit on and off once seems a lot of trouble, especially for a newbie like me who's never written a driver before.
I can do it in Python in a startup script, but that, too, seems like a heavyweight solution to a lightweight problem.
That's a wrong approach. Board file supposed to register device drivers and pass important information to them, rather than act as a device driver itself. I'm not sure if what you're trying to do is even possible.
If you really need to extract something from your I2C device on a very early stage - do that in the bootloader and pass the data to kernel via cmdline (U-boot, by the way, has I2C support for a quite some time). Then later, kernel might do appropriate actions depending on what you have passed to it.

audio codec kernel driver using alsa - capture path vs playback path

I'm using a custom board running imx6q processor, and a tlv320aic3x audio codec.
Everything works ok after some bring-up, but I'm trying to improve the audio driver: whether I'm doing playback or capture - both playback and capture related amplifiers are switched on.
This causes side effects like noise in speakers when I'm capturing audio, and wastes power.
To solve this, I'm trying to define the data paths correctly in the driver, but I keep failing.
I find it hard to find resources on-line explaining how to code an ALSA driver using the ALSA predefined macros that exists in the Kernel.
I've searched http://www.alsa-project.org/, linux docs, and few other sources...
And to my questions:
Is there any decent tutorial out there? I'm specifically interested in DAPM and usage of control names.
Is it possible to "re-program" all driver data paths from userspace?
Is DAPM sufficient for decent power management? Or should I use userspace to switch on/off power from unused paths in the codec between playbacks and captures?
Just to be clear: in user space using the standard driver, I am able to do playback, capture and control mixers, switches, etc... However I'm trying to achieve better automatic power management.
Thanks

how to access sound card in linux using nasm

hello i want to know how i can access sound card from nasm assembly program using int 0x80.
and also what values should i put in the registers when to access the sound card.
is there any manual or something that has details about the arguments that we have to pass to the kernel to access the sound card or other hardware devices, please if anyone know please tell me.
i had done alot of searching and well there alot of c libraries and ALSA and OSS and stuff like that, but what i would like is that if any one know of some resources about learning from the basics up about assembly program interfacing with the hardware.
and if any one could give me a small code listing as to how the access is done i would be very thankful.
As you've observed, the interface between user-space and kernel space in Linux is INT 0x80.
In Unix, as a matter of philosophy, (almost) everything is a file, thus sound cards are treated as "Character Files." The kernel syscalls are as per the POSIX specification - so "open","close","ioctl","read","write".
Access to the soundcard is done through the driver interface, as a file under "/dev/". Some sample documentation is at OSS documentation, but I'm not sure if its current.
To observe this communication, you can use 'strace' to see what system calls are being used by any existing application.
You will likely see a sequence like:
open("/dev/dsp", ... )
ioctl()
write()
...
write()
close()
Usually you'd get to "open" through the C library, but since you want to skip that, you can find the syscalls a few ways - one way would be
objdump -d /usr/lib/libc.a
For example, you can find that open is syscall 0x5 by looking for <__libc_open>:
You'll notice that eax is 5, and the rest of the parameters are in ebx, ecx and edx.
(The usage and parameters are also listed on Linux Syscalls )
This is what sound card drivers do. They have to be custom written for each sound card, in order to implement a common API which can be used by the O/S or applications. The same goes for other hardware devices. Hardware manufacturers tend to be less than open about how to access their stuff at this level (for one thing).
Not that I'm a Linux expert, but this is a fairly fundamental issue with all O/S's.
From user mode, this won't work - you won't have direct access to the sound hardware.
If you create a kernel-mode driver, you'd be able to directly poke the sound card hardware, but at this point I think most vendors have different implementations and don't follow a consistent standard. Newer sound cards might still be Adlib & SoundBlaster 16 compatible - this was the hardware standard WAY back when games were targetting DOS and directly used the hardware, but I wouldn't be surprised if this is no longer valid. A quick search should yield ways to directly access the interface for these legacy cards. Alternatively, you could run DOS inside of a virtual machine and access the hardware - most virtual machines emulate this level of sound card.
Depending what you're trying to do, you're probably better off using an existing library to handle the interface to the sound card, unless you aim to write a sound card driver, which I doubt, and that would be best done in C on linux.
Portaudio is one (free) one that's relatively easy to use. one example lib using portaudio with a C interface (I'm the author of wwviaudio).
FMOD seems to be big with the game programming guys, though it's not free.
sdl mixer is another one that's big with the linux game developers.
JACK is big in the linux pro-audio world. (think ardour -- the linux answer to Protools.)
There's no sense in trying to talk to the audio hardware directly from user space.

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