Qualcomm USB Audio Offloading Patches Posted For The Mainline Linux Kernel

Prior to the holiday weekend Qualcomm engineers posted a set of "request for comments" Linux kernel patches to implement USB audio offloading support for Qualcomm SoCs with a dedicated audio DSP.

The set of 14 patches allow for USB audio offloading with Qualcomm SoCs having a dedicated audio DSP that can take care of the role of issuing transfers to the USB host controller. This USB audio offloading is to free up resources currently handled by the main processors -- to in turn take care of other work or otherwise enter a lower power state.

The initial code is focused on implementing a USB back-end for the Qualcomm Hexagon Q6DSP.

Those interested in more information on thsi Qualcomm USB audio offloading work can see the RFC patch series.

Linus Torvalds' right hand man, Greg Kroah-Hartman, though responded to the series with some frustration that Google also recently posted similar work to the mainline kernel mailing list. He's hoping Google and Qualcomm engineers can work together more closely on their implementations before wasting the time with upstream review with competing/differing solutions:

This looks to duplicate a bunch of the same things that a number of different google developers have posted recently. Please work with them to come up with a unified set of patches that you all can agree with, AND get them to sign off on the changes before resubmitting them.

This uncoordinated drip of patches from different people doing the same thing is almost impossible to review from our side, as I'm sure you can imagine.

That being said, thank you finally for at least submitting all of the needed changes together as one patch set. That's a first, and something we had been asking for for years.

Here's to hoping Qualcomm can make more timely and helpful upstream contributions in 2023.