Integration into mainline Linux?

[jforberg]

I've been using this driver for several months now without any real issues. Granted, I only tested audio playback and not recording.

Do you @mmm444 think we could try to get the driver integrated to Linux mainline? It seems to me like some support would be better than none for the Linux community.

Do you see any major roadblocks to mainline support for EIE pro?

(I'm a professional C programmer doing device driver work for Linux but strictly in a proprietary setting. I don't have much experience with mainline as such).

[mncavieres]

Hi, how did you get it to work? I just tried extracting the files, cd into the folder an runing -make. After a reboot the system doesn't recognize the device either. My real question is how can I install this?

I'm running elementery os 5.1.5 Hera and would love to use it but my linux knowledge is poor

[jforberg]

@fawkez Kernel modules have to be loaded, try insmod eie-pro.ko. After reboot it will need to be loaded again, but you could install it to e.g. /lib/modules/$(uname -r)/kernel, run depmod and then modprobe eie-pro. Installation can be made "permanent" by adding a file called eie-pro.conf containing the text "eie-pro" to directory /etc/modules-load.d/.

I say "permanent" in quotes because Linux doesn't have a stable internal API/ABI so it is likely to break when you upgrade your kernel. This is always the case when you have out-of-tree kernel modules as opposed to mainline kernel modules.

Loading custom compiled kernel modules is kind of an advanced topic. But if you want to learn more, maybe start with the man pages for "modprobe" and "modules-load.d", and of course the Arch Wiki is always a good resource: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Kernel_module.

[a-michelis]

@jforberg I currently own an Akai EIE Pro card . I also own some instruments and Mics to test the driver if you wish. I can start testing after Oct. 16th (due to University Exams), as well as do minor on-the-spot code fixes to more efficiently test anything that needs to be checked (My university's field of study is Programming oriented, so... )

If I can be of help, feel free to email me, any time.

Cheers!

PS: you can also check the recording functionality by looping your outputs back to the inputs

[isaacphi]

Hey! I also have an EIE Pro and audio playback is working great for me on stock ubuntu 20.04. Thanks so much for all this work!
Unfortunately I can't get recording to work and can't get this interface working at all with jack. Please let me know if there are any specific logs I can look at to debug.

I'm more than happy to help test the interface. I'm not sure how much I can help beyond that but would put in time given some guidance.

[wittling]

I have an EIE Pro, and have kept a Windows laptop for using it with Reaper so I can do some music covers (I haven't done any in a while). Man would it be nice to use a Linux-based DAW (Reaper runs on Linux now!) and kick the Windows laptop out the door. But to do that requires a reinvestment in a new audio interface rather than the Akai EIE Pro. The Akai EIE Pro is a beautiful device - quality made. I would love to see if it could work on Linux. I have a lab where I could test out the recording, if someone was willing to enhance that to work. I don't have a strong device driver development background, unfortunately.

[jforberg]

@wittling The most helpful thing would be to help smoke out the bugs in the current driver. Ideally, including steps to reproduce any bugs. That would greatly help anyone who wanted to bring this driver up to merge quality. To be clear, I'm not ready to promise that I will be that person :)

Trying to remember now, I have noticed that the driver sometimes flakes out under high CPU load. I also seem to recall that it didn't like being fed mono audio.

Based on my experience I can see some (minor) code quality issues that would be relatively easy to fix. My background is generally in video/image processing, not audio.

[wittling]

I have a Linux laptop or two hanging around, and I can start to look at it. I don't do a lot of coding these days, but I used to code back in the day. Not drivers though, and not audio. Network programming. So I do know what a kernel module is (we compiled kernel modules to do packet filtering). I can try to build and install this kernel module. I think a simple modprobe should work, if it compiles properly. There isn't a whole lot of code here. 300+ lines of C code, a little bit of Python (which looks to me like it is handling the USB?), and a very short little bash script. I don't know where the Python and the bash stuff needs to be (if I do a make, then make install, maybe it puts everything where it needs to be). I guess I will need to see if there are any flags or kernel module parameters for debug, so that some stuff can be printed out. Or, does this kernel module log to syslog?