Le mardi 27 août 2019 à 16:14 +0200, Arnd Bergmann a écrit :
On Thu, Aug 22, 2019 at 9:25 PM Scott Branden scott.branden@broadcom.com wrote:
Add Broadcom Valkyrie driver offload engine. This driver interfaces to the Valkyrie PCIe offload engine to perform should offload functions as video transcoding on multiple streams in parallel. Valkyrie device is booted from files loaded using request_firmware_into_buf mechanism. After booted card status is updated and messages can then be sent to the card. Such messages contain scatter gather list of addresses to pull data from the host to perform operations on.
Signed-off-by: Scott Branden scott.branden@broadcom.com Signed-off-by: Desmond Yan desmond.yan@broadcom.com Signed-off-by: James Hu james.hu@broadcom.com
Can you explain the decision to make this is a standalone misc driver rather than hooking into the existing framework in drivers/media?
There is an existing interface that looks like it could fit the hardware in include/media/v4l2-mem2mem.h. Have you considered using that?
There is also support for video transcoding using GPUs in driver/gpu/drm/, that could also be used in theory, though it sounds like a less optimal fit.
I believe that a major obstacle with this driver is usability. Even though I have read through, I believe it's just impossible for anyone to actually write Open Source userspace for it. The commit message does not even try to help in this regard.
Note that depending on the feature your transcoder has, there is also the option to model it around the media controller. That is notably useful for certain transcoders that will also do scaling and produce multiple streams (for adaptive streaming usecases were you want to share a single decoder).
An 1 to 1 transcoder modeled around m2m would eventually required documentation so that other transcoder can be implemented in a way that they would share the same userspace. This is currently being worked on for m2m encoder and decoders (including state-less variants).
regards, Nicolas