SAI Linux driver

Stable: 12.07.2023 - 10:24 / Revision: 12.07.2023 - 10:23

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1 Article purpose

This article introduces the SAI Linux® driver for the SAI internal peripheral.

2 Short Description

The SAI[1]Linux driver is an ASoC CPU DAI driver implemented in the Linux ALSA framework.

3 Configuration

3.1 Kernel Configuration

Activate the SAI[1]Linux driver in the kernel configuration using the Linux Menuconfig tool: Menuconfig or how to configure kernel. 

[*] Device Drivers
    [*] Sound card support
        [*] Advanced Linux Sound Architecture
            [*] ALSA for SoC audio support
                STMicroelectronics STM32 SOC audio support
	             [*] STM32 SAI interface (Serial Audio Interface) support

3.2 Device tree

Refer to the SAI device tree configuration article when configuring the SAI Linux kernel driver.

4 How to use

The SAI Linux driver can be accessed from userland through an ALSA device. Refer to ALSA overview for information on how to list and use ALSA devices.

5 How to trace and debug

The debugfs and procfs file system can be checked to get information on the SAI driver and the resources it uses. A non-exhaustive list of these file system entries is provided below. Refer to ALSA overview for more details on debugging tools.

  • debugfs entries:
$ cat /sys/kernel/debug/regmap/xxx.audio-controller/registers
  • procfs entries:
$ cat /proc/interrupts

6 Source code location

The STM32 SAI peripheral includes two independent audio subblocks that share common resources. The driver source code reflects this architecture.

sound/soc/stm/stm32_sai.c : handles common resources such as clock, interrupt, reset and shared register.

sound/soc/stm/stm32_sai_sub.c : handles the resources dedicated to each subblock.

7 References

  1. ↑ 1.01.1 SAI internal peripheral



Serial audio interface (Mechanism used to transfer non-buffered audio data between processors and/or audio converters.)

Linux® is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

ALSA system on chip

Central processing unit

Digital audio interface

Advanced Linux sound architecture

Process file system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procfs for more details)

Debug file system (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugfs for more details)

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