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Sound Open Firmware is an open source audio DSP firmware and SDK that provides audio firmware infrastructure and development tools for developers who are interested in audio or signal processing on modern DSPs

Sound Open Firmware has multiple components but in order to understand the proposal one needs to firstly have a look at these two components:

• SOF Linux kernel driver, this runs on the ARM core and it's the link between ALSA kernel layer and DSP.
• SOF firmware, this runs on the DSP and it is responsible for audio processing, etc.

The goal of this project is to enahance the Linux kernel driver debugging support. This includes:

• add functionality to retrieve DSP traces when DSP panics.
• add functionality to filter logs from DSP based on various parameters.
• enhance and update documentation
• add a serial console driver on DSP (this is optional)

Github issues:

• Refactor trace system

Code license: GPL-2.0 OR BSD-3-Clause

The project is considered successful if the code is accepted into SOF github tree.

Have a look at:

• Sound Open Firmware introduction
• Sound Open Firmware docs
• Sound Open Firmware github

All the ideas below are just ways of exploring the project.

• Follow tutorial here Getting started in order to compile Linux kernel, SOF firmware, SOF topologies.

• Fork https://github.com/thesofproject/sof.git repo into your github account
• Follow instructions here Create a Pull Request and learn how to create a PR.
• Use checkpatch.pl to find small issues to fix
• e.g ./scripts/checkpatch.pl –no-tree –strict -f src/lib/alloc.c
• Keep in mind, a commit should fix only one type of error/warnings. If you need to fix multiple problems create multiple commits.
• Learn how to create a good commit message

Watch this Write and Submit your first Linux kernel Patch.

Before sending the patch to community please send it to daniel.baluta@nxp.com for review. Make sure you only look into drivers/staging directory.

• Qemu repo is at https://github.com/thesofproject/qemu/ we use branch sof-v4.2
• Build qemu by looking at Firmware . Look at chapter 'Build the Qemu DSP emulator from source.'
• Try to boot sof-imx8.ri SOF binary with qemu
  • Use the following command ./xtensa-softmmu/qemu-system-xtensa -cpu imx8 -M adsp_imx8 -nographic -kernel ../sof.git/build_imx8_gcc/src/arch/xtensa/sof-imx8.ri
• Look at Using the Qemu DSP emulator and try to run a full system with Linux kernel and SOF firmware.

Use an IRC client like pidgin to join #sof channel on irc.freenode.net. There you can find support and quick answers.

If you are interested about this project please drop me an email at: Daniel Baluta daniel.baluta@nxp.com

You can also find me on IRC: _daniel_ on #alsa-soc OR #sof channel, on irc.freenode.net server Web IRC