Re: Stateless Encoding uAPI Discussion and Proposal

[Hans Verkuil]

On 11/07/2023 20:18, Nicolas Dufresne wrote:
> Le mardi 11 juillet 2023 à 19:12 +0200, Paul Kocialkowski a écrit :
>> Hi everyone!
>>
>> After various discussions following Andrzej's talk at EOSS, feedback from the
>> Media Summit (which I could not attend unfortunately) and various direct
>> discussions, I have compiled some thoughts and ideas about stateless encoders
>> support with various proposals. This is the result of a few years of interest
>> in the topic, after working on a PoC for the Hantro H1 using the hantro driver,
>> which turned out to have numerous design issues.
>>
>> I am now working on a H.264 encoder driver for Allwinner platforms (currently
>> focusing on the V3/V3s), which already provides some usable bitstream and will
>> be published soon.
>>
>> This is a very long email where I've tried to split things into distinct topics
>> and explain a few concepts to make sure everyone is on the same page.
>>
>> # Bitstream Headers
>>
>> Stateless encoders typically do not generate all the bitstream headers and
>> sometimes no header at all (e.g. Allwinner encoder does not even produce slice
>> headers). There's often some hardware block that makes bit-level writing to the
>> destination buffer easier (deals with alignment, etc).
>>
>> The values of the bitstream headers must be in line with how the compressed
>> data bitstream is generated and generally follow the codec specification.
>> Some encoders might allow configuring all the fields found in the headers,
>> others may only allow configuring a few or have specific constraints regarding
>> which values are allowed.
>>
>> As a result, we cannot expect that any given encoder is able to produce frames
>> for any set of headers. Reporting related constraints and limitations (beyond
>> profile/level) seems quite difficult and error-prone.
>>
>> So it seems that keeping header generation in-kernel only (close to where the
>> hardware is actually configured) is the safest approach.
> 
> This seems to match with what happened with the Hantro VP8 proof of concept. The
> encoder does not produce the frame header, but also, it produces 2 encoded
> buffers which cannot be made contiguous at the hardware level. This notion of
> plane in coded data wasn't something that blended well with the rest of the API
> and we didn't want to copy in the kernel while the userspace would also be
> forced to copy to align the headers. Our conclusion was that it was best to
> generate the headers and copy both segment before delivering to userspace. I
> suspect this type of situation will be quite common.
> 
>>
>> # Codec Features
>>
>> Codecs have many variable features that can be enabled or not and specific
>> configuration fields that can take various values. There is usually some
>> top-level indication of profile/level that restricts what can be used.
>>
>> This is a very similar situation to stateful encoding, where codec-specific
>> controls are used to report and set profile/level and configure these aspects.
>> A particularly nice thing about it is that we can reuse these existing controls
>> and add new ones in the future for features that are not yet covered.
>>
>> This approach feels more flexible than designing new structures with a selected
>> set of parameters (that could match the existing controls) for each codec.
> 
> Though, reading more into this emails, we still have a fair amount of controls
> to design and add, probably some compound controls too ?

I expect that for stateless encoders support for read-only requests will be needed:

https://patchwork.linuxtv.org/project/linux-media/list/?series=5647

I worked on that in the past together with dynamic control arrays. The dynamic
array part was merged, but the read-only request part wasn't (there was never a
driver that actually needed it).

I don't know if that series still applies, but if there is a need for it then I
can rebase it and post an RFCv3.

Regards,

	Hans