To help work with these buses Linux 2.6.32 will follow the clock API and allow the use of the dev_name() for the device instead. A new field dev_name has been added to struct regulator_consumer_supply which should be used instead of dev – this is now the preferred mechanism. It is a simple string and so does not depend on any other initialization.

For those backporting the relevant commit is 744ea1d0b59bf084f19559b8f199b644fbb0899c.

Joss is right, though – most applications should be working with a higher level user space API than either ALSA or OSS. One of the most obvious examples of this is in the embedded space where there are often vast numbers of controls that need to be exported in order to support the complex audio routing that devices like phones can have. Most of these should only be touched very occasionally when changing use case and should therefore be hidden from normal applications where they’re at best irrelevant and at worst confuse end users. They do, however, need to be exposed by the kernel in order to allow user space the flexibility to manage the audio configuration of the system at run time.