This is a note to let you know that I've just added the patch titled
ALSA: pcm: update tstamp only if audio_tstamp changed
to the 4.4-stable tree which can be found at: http://www.kernel.org/git/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/stable-queue.git%3Ba=su...
The filename of the patch is: alsa-pcm-update-tstamp-only-if-audio_tstamp-changed.patch and it can be found in the queue-4.4 subdirectory.
If you, or anyone else, feels it should not be added to the stable tree, please let stable@vger.kernel.org know about it.
From 20e3f985bb875fea4f86b04eba4b6cc29bfd6b71 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Henrik Eriksson henrik.eriksson@axis.com Date: Tue, 21 Nov 2017 09:29:28 +0100 Subject: ALSA: pcm: update tstamp only if audio_tstamp changed
From: Henrik Eriksson henrik.eriksson@axis.com
commit 20e3f985bb875fea4f86b04eba4b6cc29bfd6b71 upstream.
commit 3179f6200188 ("ALSA: core: add .get_time_info") had a side effect of changing the behaviour of the PCM runtime tstamp. Prior to this change tstamp was not updated by snd_pcm_update_hw_ptr0() unless the hw_ptr had moved, after this change tstamp was always updated.
For an application using alsa-lib, doing snd_pcm_readi() followed by snd_pcm_status() to estimate the age of the read samples by subtracting status->avail * [sample rate] from status->tstamp this change degraded the accuracy of the estimate on devices where the pcm hw does not provide a granular hw_ptr, e.g., devices using soc-generic-dmaengine-pcm.c and a dma-engine with residue_granularity DMA_RESIDUE_GRANULARITY_DESCRIPTOR. The accuracy of the estimate depended on the latency between the PCM hw completing a period and the driver called snd_pcm_period_elapsed() to notify ALSA core, typically determined by interrupt handling latency. After the change the accuracy of the estimate depended on the latency between the PCM hw completing a period and the application calling snd_pcm_status(), determined by the scheduling of the application process. The maximum error of the estimate is one period length in both cases, but the error average and variance is smaller when it depends on interrupt latency.
Instead of always updating tstamp, update it only if audio_tstamp changed.
Fixes: 3179f6200188 ("ALSA: core: add .get_time_info") Suggested-by: Pierre-Louis Bossart pierre-louis.bossart@linux.intel.com Signed-off-by: Henrik Eriksson henrik.eriksson@axis.com Signed-off-by: Takashi Iwai tiwai@suse.de Signed-off-by: Greg Kroah-Hartman gregkh@linuxfoundation.org
--- sound/core/pcm_lib.c | 6 ++++-- 1 file changed, 4 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-)
--- a/sound/core/pcm_lib.c +++ b/sound/core/pcm_lib.c @@ -264,8 +264,10 @@ static void update_audio_tstamp(struct s runtime->rate); *audio_tstamp = ns_to_timespec(audio_nsecs); } - runtime->status->audio_tstamp = *audio_tstamp; - runtime->status->tstamp = *curr_tstamp; + if (!timespec_equal(&runtime->status->audio_tstamp, audio_tstamp)) { + runtime->status->audio_tstamp = *audio_tstamp; + runtime->status->tstamp = *curr_tstamp; + }
/* * re-take a driver timestamp to let apps detect if the reference tstamp
Patches currently in stable-queue which might be from henrik.eriksson@axis.com are
queue-4.4/alsa-pcm-update-tstamp-only-if-audio_tstamp-changed.patch