New full-featured driver for ESI Juli@ PCI soundcard

[Konstantin Dimitrov]

hi Aleksei,

that's great and I am very glad to see this! Also, I like that it
seems you want to make it perfect and that's why let me comment a
little bit on the hardware architecture as per your source code:

>     * 5: pulled up to ground with resistor on analog board, may be analog board detector, unused

it's not "maybe", but for sure and '0' means Analog Daughter Board is
present, '1' means it's not present

>     * 6: UNKNOWN - if You know what its function is, please let me know, seems to be always LOW

that's not used, if my memory serves me right, it's not even connected
on the board. so, it's totally irrelevant.

>     * 7: UNKNOWN - if You know what its function is, please let me know, seems to be always LOW

that's most interesting, that GPIO signal is to deal with MCKO1 signal
of AK4114. I am not sure how that exactly works on ESI Juli@, but on
another ESI card Prodigy192, you can read comment about it in ALSA
"prodigy192.c" - by "FPGA" ALSA guys actually mean the CPLD found on
Juli@ as well:

"both MCKO1 and MCKO2 of ak4114 are fed to FPGA, which
* outputs master clock to SPMCLKIN of ice1724.
* Experimentally I found out that only a combination of
* OCKS0=1, OCKS1=1 (128fs, 64fs output) and ice1724 -
* VT1724_MT_I2S_MCLK_128X=0 (256fs input) yields correct
* sampling rate. That means the the FPGA doubles the
* MCK01 rate."

So, without some experiments it could only be speculated how GPIO7
affects MCKO1 signal of AK4114 on Juli at . I really don't know and it's
up to investigation, but one possibility is that for sample rates
lower than 96kHz, they set AK4114 OCKS0 to '0'  and OCKS1 to '0' and
maybe in such cases GPIO7 set to '1' is the intended settings or
something like that. Anyway, someone with Juli@ and proper equipment
needs to see what's going on with the mentioned signals with when
GPIO7 is '0' and when it's set to '1', if anything...

best wishes,
konstantin

On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 4:24 PM fesse via freebsd-drivers
<freebsd-drivers at freebsd.org> wrote:
>
> Hi everyone!
>
> I want to share with the community a new driver for ESI Juli@ PCI soundcard.
> FreeBSD already offers support for such card, but this support is very limited and device is almost unusable.
> Since I like high-quality audio hardware (like Juli@ cards), time was spent writing a new, full-featured driver for it.
> The proposed driver supports playback, recording, MIDI, pass-through channel, clock control, ACPI...
> Also, the driver can be controlled with convenient GUI control panel, as through sysctl(8).
>
> I hope this work was done for a reason and will be useful to someone else.
>
> I have been using this driver successfully for some time, but there may be bugs, so more testing is required.
> It would be great if there were those who wanted to download, test it, and share results.
>
> Driver link: https://sndbro.ru/snd_juliet?lang=en
> Control panel link: https://sndbro.ru/mixate-juliet?lang=en
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