On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 8:06 PM, Hans Verkuil hverkuil@xs4all.nl wrote:
Exceptions are DSPs/processors. While it is definitely possible to use V4L2 there as well, in practice I don't see this happening anytime soon. It would be a very interesting experiment though.
In drivers/staging/tidspbridge http://omappedia.org/wiki/DSPBridge_Project you find the TI hackers happy at work with providing a DSP accelerator subsystem.
When I look at the code it looks quite TI-centric, but nevertheless: they try to sort out something here.
Their idea of things is that DSPs can well be used with other things than multimedia, so e.g. you userspace SETI@Home client or whatever that wants to offload some stuff with a piece of DSP firmware should be able to access this resource.
Maybe that's the path forward, I don't quite know. Maybe wrapping the DSP bridge into a V4L codec (for example) inside the kernel to accelerate a media stream is the proper thing to do, so we get some cross-subsystem talk for these things.
Yours, Linus Walleij