Hi Hans,
On Wednesday 06 June 2012 10:17:03 Hans Verkuil wrote:
On Wed 6 June 2012 05:46:34 Laurent Pinchart wrote:
On Monday 04 June 2012 12:34:23 Rebecca Schultz Zavin wrote:
I have a system where the data is planar, but the kernel drivers expect to get one allocation with offsets for the planes. I can't figure out how to do that with the current dma_buf implementation. I thought I could pass the same dma_buf several times and use the data_offset field of the v4l2_plane struct but it looks like that's only for output. Am I missing something? Is this supported?
data_offset is indeed for video output only at the moment, and doesn't seem to be used by any driver in mainline for now.
Actually, data_offset may be set by capture drivers. For output buffers it is set by userspace, for capture buffers it is set by the driver. This data_offset typically contains meta data.
Is that documented somewhere ? I wasn't aware of this use case.
I can't really see a reason why data_offset couldn't be used for video capture devices as well.
Sanity checks are currently missing. For output devices we should check that data_offset + bytesused < length in the vb2 core. For input devices the check will have to be performed by drivers. Taking data_offset into account automatically would also be useful. I think most of that should be possible to implement in the allocators.
See this proposal of how to solve this:
This requires more discussions regarding how the app_offset and data_offset fields should be used for the different memory types we support.
For instance app_offset would not make that much sense for the USERPTR memory type, as we can include the offset in the user pointer already (using app_offset there would only make the code more complex without any added benefit).
For the MMAP memory type adding an app_offset would require allocating buffers large enough to accomodate the offset, and would thus only be useful with CREATE_BUFS. I'm also wondering whether the main use case (passing the buffer to another device that requires that app_offset) wouldn't be better addressed by the DMABUF memory type anyway.
Comments are welcome.