Hi all, The goal of this e-mail is to schedule a meeting in order to discuss improvements at the media subsystem in order to support complex camera hardware by usual apps. The main focus here is to allow supporting devices with MC-based hardware connected to a camera. In short, my proposal is to meet with the interested parties on solving this issue during the Open Source Summit in Japan, e. g. between June, 19-22, in Tokyo. I'd like to know who is interested on joining us for such meeting, and to hear a proposal of themes for discussions. I'm enclosing a detailed description of the problem, in order to allow the interested parties to be at the same page. Regards, Mauro --- 1. Introduction =============== 1.1 V4L2 Kernel aspects ----------------------- The media subsystem supports two types of devices: - "traditional" media hardware, supported via V4L2 API. On such hardware, opening a single device node (usually /dev/video0) is enough to control the entire device. We call it as devnode-based devices. - Media-controller based devices. On those devices, there are several /dev/video? nodes and several /dev/v4l2-subdev? nodes, plus a media controller device node (usually /dev/media0). We call it as mc-based devices. Controlling the hardware require opening the media device (/dev/media0), setup the pipeline and adjust the sub-devices via /dev/v4l2-subdev?. Only streaming is controlled by /dev/video?. All "standard" media applications, including open source ones (Camorama, Cheese, Xawtv, Firefox, Chromium, ...) and closed source ones (Skype, Chrome, ...) supports devnode-based devices. Support for mc-based devices currently require an specialized application in order to prepare the device for its usage (setup pipelines, adjust hardware controls, etc). Once pipeline is set, the streaming goes via /dev/video?, although usually some /dev/v4l2-subdev? devnodes should also be opened, in order to implement algorithms designed to make video quality reasonable. On such devices, it is not uncommon that the device used by the application to be a random number (on OMAP3 driver, typically, is either /dev/video4 or /dev/video6). One example of such hardware is at the OMAP3-based hardware: http://www.infradead.org/~mchehab/mc-next-gen/omap3-igepv2-with-tvp5150.png On the picture, there's a graph with the hardware blocks in blue/dark/blue and the corresponding devnode interfaces in yellow. The mc-based approach was taken when support for Nokia N9/N900 cameras was added (with has OMAP3 SoC). It is required because the camera hardware on SoC comes with a media processor (ISP), with does a lot more than just capturing, allowing complex algorithms to enhance image quality in runtime. Those algorithms are known as 3A - an acronym for 3 other acronyms: - AE (Auto Exposure); - AF (Auto Focus); - AWB (Auto White Balance). Setting a camera with such ISPs are harder because the pipelines to be set actually depends the requirements for those 3A algorithms to run. Also, usually, the 3A algorithms use some chipset-specific userspace API, that exports some image properties, calculated by the ISP, to speed up the convergence of those algorithms. Btw, usually, the 3A algorithms are IP-protected, provided by vendors as binary only blobs, although there are a few OSS implementations. 1.2 V4L2 userspace aspects -------------------------- Back when USB cameras were introduced, the hardware were really simple: they had a CCD camera sensor and a chip that bridges the data though USB. CCD camera sensors typically provide data using a bayer format, but they usually have their own proprietary ways to pack the data, in order to reduce the USB bandwidth (original cameras were USB 1.1). So, V4L2 has a myriad of different formats, in order to match each CCD camera sensor format. At the end of the day, applications were able to use only a subset of the available hardware, since they need to come with format converters for all formats the developer uses (usually a very small subset of the available ones). To end with this mess, an userspace library was written, called libv4l. It supports all those proprietary formats. So, applications can use a RGB or YUV format, without needing to concern about conversions. The way it works is by adding wrappers to system calls: open, close, ioctl, mmap, mmunmap. So, a conversion to use it is really simple: at the source code of the apps, all it was needed is to prepend the existing calls with "v4l2_", e. g. v4l2_open, v4l2_close, etc. All open source apps we know now supports libv4l. On a few (like gstreamer), support for it is optional. In order to support closed source, another wrapper was added, allowing to call any closed source application to use it, by using LD_PRELOAD. For example, using skype with it is as simple as calling it with: $ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libv4l/v4l1compat.so /usr/bin/skypeforlinux 2. Current problems =================== 2.1 Libv4l can slow image handling ---------------------------------- Nowadays, almost all new "simple" cameras are connected via USB using the UVC class (USB Video Class). UVC standardized the allowed formats, and most apps just implement them. The UVC hardware is more complex, having format converters inside it. So, for most usages, format conversion isn't needed anymore. The need of doing format conversion in software makes libv4l slow, requiring lots of CPU usage in order to convert a 4K or 8K format, being even worse with 3D cameras. Also, due to the need of supporting LD_PRELOAD, zero-buffer copy via DMA_BUFFER currently doesn't work with libv4l. Right now, gstreamer defaults to not enable libv4l2, mainly due to those performance issues. 2.2 Modern hardware is starting to come with "complex" camera ISP ----------------------------------------------------------------- While mc-based devices were limited to SoC, it was easy to "delegate" the task of talking with the hardware to the embedded hardware designers. However, this is changing. Dell Latitude 5285 laptop is a standard PC with an i3-core, i5-core or i7-core CPU, with comes with the Intel IMU3 ISP hardware[1] [1] https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-usb/msg167478.html There, instead of an USB camera, the hardware is equipped with a MC-based ISP, connected to its camera. Currently, despite having a Kernel driver for it, the camera doesn't work with any userspace application. I'm also aware of other projects that are considering the usage of mc-based devices for non-dedicated hardware. 3. How to solve it? =================== That's the main focus of the meeting :-) >From a previous discussion I had with media sub-maintainers, there are at least two actions that seem required. I'm listing them below as an starting point for the discussions, but we can eventually come up with some different approach after the meeting. 3.1 libv4l2 support for mc-based hardware ========================================= In order to support those hardware, we'll need to do some redesign mainly at libv4l2[2]. The idea is to work on a new API for libv4l2 that will allow to split the format conversion on a separate part of it, add support for DMA Buffer and come up with a way for the library to work transparently with both devnode-based and mc-based hardware. That envolves adding capacity at libv4l to setup hardware pipelines and to propagate controls among their sub-devices. Eventually, part of it will be done in Kernel. That should give performance increase at the library and would allow gstreamer to use it by default, without compromising performance. [2] I don't discard that some Kernel changes could also be part of the solution, like, for example, doing control propagation along the pipeline on simple use case scenarios. 3.2 libv4l2 support for 3A algorithms ===================================== The 3A algorithm handing is highly dependent on the hardware. The idea here is to allow libv4l to have a set of 3A algorithms that will be specific to certain mc-based hardware. Ideally, this should be added in a way that it will allow external closed-source algorithms to run as well. Thanks, Mauro
