[maemo-developers] ALSA sound driver for Nokia 770 and DSP programming

[From: Siarhei Siamashka]

On Thursday 25 September 2008, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 10:07 PM, Siarhei Siamashka
[...]
> > Now regarding why we may want it. Once if we get a good, low latency,
> > fully functional and reliable ALSA sound driver running on ARM, it gives
> > maemo community a nice possibility to scrap all the proprietary DSP
> > binaries. This provides us with a new and shiny 252MHz C55x DSP core
> > ready to be used by something else :)
> >
> > Free linux DSP toolchain from TI [4] supports generation of both DSP
> > kernel and DSP tasks for OMAP1 based devices which is sufficient for DSP
> > development. The toolchain license was supposed to permit open source
> > development (with noncommercial restriction), though the license text
> > itself is a bit questionable [5].
> >
> > With DSP avalable for use and having no need to spend efforts on ensuring
> > compatibility and peaceful coexistence with proprietary binary codecs
> > (free and proprietary code does not mix well), it should be possible to
> > turn Nokia 770 into quite a powerful media player.
>
> Great stuff!
>
> Do you plan to use the dsp-gateway or dsp-bridge?

Now as you mentioned that, it indeed makes sense to consider other
alternatives if they exist. Do you have any links to the information about 
dspgateway vs. dspbridge comparison (features/performance/reliability)?

Using dspgateway has a clear advantage that it is already included in the 
kernel. And dspgateway is more or less ok, though patching it a bit in order
to improve performance will be required.

-- 
Best regards,
Siarhei Siamashka