Changes to the FireWire kernel drivers in Linux 3.12 and 3.13

[Stefan R. <st...@s5...>]

Hi all,

besides the usual small behind-the-curtains changes, the following notable
IEEE 1394 kernel updates have been released with the latest kernel
versions:

*Linux 3.12, released on November 3*

firewire-core and firewire-ohci:
  - Fix a subsystem deadlock at bus reset which was sometimes observed
    if CPU resources were low.  (This fixes a regression since Linux
    3.2 inclusive.  The subsystem workqueue deadlocked between
    transaction completion handling and bus reset handling if the
    kernel's worker thread pool could not be increased in time.) 

*Linux 3.13, released on January 19*

snd-dice:
  - New ALSA driver, written by Clemens Ladisch.  This is a playback-only
    driver for IEEE 1394 audio interfaces which are based on the DICE chip
    family (DICE-II/Jr/Mini) from TC Applied Technologies.

    For the time being, this driver is being bound only to devices which
    do not expose recording channels.  Drivers which support playback +
    capture + MIDI are available from the FFADO project in the form of
    JACK backends, implemented in userspace.

    There are people working on extending the snd-dice ALSA driver to
    support capture and MIDI too, and to bring similar ALSA support to
    other FireWire audio devices.  When this is done, ALSA would replace
    FFADO's streaming related components.  Device control however, i.e.
    mixer and router controls etc., will continue to be implemented in
    userspace (typically by ffado-mixer of the FFADO project). 

(Those who want to try the snd-dice playback driver together with DICE
devices which are not limited to playback in hardware, can generate
themselves a reverting patch from commit b20be8de1b39.  Then such a
device will be available through ALSA as if it was a playback-only capable
device.)
-- 
Stefan Richter
-=====-====- ---= =-=--
http://arcgraph.de/sr/