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Reply-To: kieran.bingham@ideasonboard.com
Subject: Re: [PATCH v2 0/3] media: vimc: Allow multiple capture devices to use
 the same sensor
To:     Dafna Hirschfeld <dafna.hirschfeld@collabora.com>,
        Kaaira Gupta <kgupta@es.iitr.ac.in>,
        Helen Koike <helen.koike@collabora.com>
Cc:     =?UTF-8?Q?Niklas_S=c3=b6derlund?= <niklas.soderlund@ragnatech.se>,
        Shuah Khan <skhan@linuxfoundation.org>,
        Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@kernel.org>,
        linux-media@vger.kernel.org, linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org,
        Hans Verkuil <hverkuil@xs4all.nl>,
        Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>,
        Ezequiel Garcia <ezequiel@collabora.com>
References: <20200724120213.17119-1-kgupta@es.iitr.ac.in>
 <20200724121521.GA2705690@oden.dyn.berto.se>
 <20200724122104.GA18482@kaaira-HP-Pavilion-Notebook>
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 <20200728113959.GA6350@kaaira-HP-Pavilion-Notebook>
 <3a9ac970-77b8-1bc5-536a-5b4f2bd60745@collabora.com>
 <b5fd3811-2f0e-7563-13fa-bb1e32189814@collabora.com>
 <f2fc6d81-16a6-206b-6bb2-fb99d5a84f65@ideasonboard.com>
 <cd1d18ef-d4ff-8240-e9dd-2d9f9c7c5a45@collabora.com>
From:   Kieran Bingham <kieran.bingham@ideasonboard.com>
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Organization: Ideas on Board
Message-ID: <a2ae2dba-6076-0abc-f620-9047a52b513c@ideasonboard.com>
Date:   Wed, 29 Jul 2020 14:27:50 +0100
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In-Reply-To: <cd1d18ef-d4ff-8240-e9dd-2d9f9c7c5a45@collabora.com>
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Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org
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Hi Dafna, Kaaira,

On 29/07/2020 14:16, Dafna Hirschfeld wrote:
> 
> 
> On 29.07.20 15:05, Kieran Bingham wrote:
>> Hi Dafna,
>>
>> On 28/07/2020 15:00, Dafna Hirschfeld wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> On 28.07.20 14:07, Dafna Hirschfeld wrote:
>>>> Hi
>>>>
>>>> On 28.07.20 13:39, Kaaira Gupta wrote:
>>>>> On Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 02:54:30PM -0300, Helen Koike wrote:
>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>
>>>>>> On 7/27/20 11:31 AM, Kieran Bingham wrote:
>>>>>>> Hi all,
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> +Dafna for the thread discussion, as she's missed from the to/cc
>>>>>>> list.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 24/07/2020 13:21, Kaaira Gupta wrote:
>>>>>>>> On Fri, Jul 24, 2020 at 02:15:21PM +0200, Niklas Söderlund wrote:
>>>>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Hi Kaaira,
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> Thanks for your work.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Thanks for yours :D
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> On 2020-07-24 17:32:10 +0530, Kaaira Gupta wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> This is version 2 of the patch series posted by Niklas for
>>>>>>>>>> allowing
>>>>>>>>>> multiple streams in VIMC.
>>>>>>>>>> The original series can be found here:
>>>>>>>>>> https://patchwork.kernel.org/cover/10948831/
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> This series adds support for two (or more) capture devices to be
>>>>>>>>>> connected to the same sensors and run simultaneously. Each
>>>>>>>>>> capture device
>>>>>>>>>> can be started and stopped independent of each other.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Patch 1/3 and 2/3 deals with solving the issues that arises once
>>>>>>>>>> two
>>>>>>>>>> capture devices can be part of the same pipeline. While 3/3
>>>>>>>>>> allows for
>>>>>>>>>> two capture devices to be part of the same pipeline and thus
>>>>>>>>>> allows for
>>>>>>>>>> simultaneously use.
>>>>
>>>> I wonder if these two patches are enough, since each vimc entity also
>>>> have
>>>> a 'process_frame' callback, but only one allocated frame. That means
>>>> that the 'process_frame' can be called concurrently by two different
>>>> streams
>>>> on the same frame and cause corruption.
>>>>
>>>
>>> I think we should somehow change the vimc-stream.c code so that we have
>>> only
>>> one stream process per pipe. So if one capture is already streaming,
>>> then the new
>>> capture that wants to stream uses the same thread so we don't have two
>>> threads
>>> both calling 'process_frame'.
>>
>>
>> Yes, I think it looks and sounds like there are two threads running when
>> there are two streams.
>>
>> so in effect, although they 'share a pipe', aren't they in effect just
>> sending two separate buffers through their stream-path?
>>
>> If that's the case, then I don't think there's any frame corruption,
>> because they would both have grabbed their own frame separately.
> 
> But each entity allocates just one buffer. So the same buffer is used for
> both stream.

Aha, ok, I hadn't realised there was only a single buffer available in
the pipeline for each entity. Indeed there is a risk of corruption in
that case.

> What for example can happen is that the debayer of one stream can read the
> sensor's buffer while the sensor itself writes to the buffer for the other
> stream.


So, In that case, we have currently got a scenario where each 'stream'
really is operating it's own pipe (even though all components are reused).

Two questions:

Is this acceptable, and we should just use a mutex to ensure the buffers
are not corrupted, but essentially each stream is a separate temporal
capture?


Or B:

Should we refactor to make sure that there is a single thread, and the
code which calls process_frame on each entity should become aware of the
potential for multiple paths at the point of the sensor.


I suspect option B is really the 'right' path to take, but it is more
complicated of course.

--
Kieran


> Thanks,
> Dafna
> 
>>
>>
>> I don't think that's a good example of the hardware though, as that
>> doesn't reflect what 'should' happen where the TPG runs once to generate
>> a frame at the sensor, which is then read by both the debayer entity and
>> the RAW capture device when there are two streams...
>>
>>
>> So I suspect trying to move to a single thread is desirable, but that
>> might be a fair bit of work also.
>>
>> -- 
>> Kieran
>>
>>
>>
>>> The second capture that wants to stream should iterate the topology
>>> downwards until
>>> reaching an entity that already belong to the stream path of the other
>>> streaming capture
>>> and tell the streamer it wants to read the frames this entity
>>> produces.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Dafna
>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Dafna
>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> I'm just curious if you are aware of this series? It would
>>>>>>>>> replace the
>>>>>>>>> need for 1/3 and 2/3 of this series right?
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> v3 of this series replaces the need for 1/3, but not the current
>>>>>>>> version
>>>>>>>> (ie v4). v4 of patch 2/5 removes the stream_counter that is
>>>>>>>> needed to
>>>>>>>> keep count of the calls to s_stream. Hence 1/3 becomes relevant
>>>>>>>> again.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> So the question really is, how do we best make use of the two
>>>>>>> current
>>>>>>> series, to achieve our goal of supporting multiple streams.
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Having not parsed Dafna's series yet, do we need to combine
>>>>>>> elements of
>>>>>>> both ? Or should we work towards starting with this series and get
>>>>>>> dafna's patches built on top ?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Or should patch 1/3 and 3/3 of this series be on top of Dafna's v4 ?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> (It might be noteworthy to say that Kaaira has reported successful
>>>>>>> multiple stream operation from /this/ series and her development
>>>>>>> branch
>>>>>>> on libcamera).
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Dafna's patch seems still under discussion, but I don't want to
>>>>>> block progress in Vimc either.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> So I was wondering if we can move forward with Vimc support for
>>>>>> multistreaming,
>>>>>> without considering Dafna's patchset, and we can do the clean up
>>>>>> later once we solve that.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> What do you think?
>>>>>
>>>>> I agree with supporting multiple streams with VIMC with this patchset,
>>>>> and then we can refactor the counters for s_stream in VIMC later (over
>>>>> this series) if dafna includes them in subsequent version of her
>>>>> patchset.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I also think that adding support in the code will take much longer and
>>>> should not
>>>> stop us from supporting vimc independently.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks,
>>>> Dafna
>>>>
>>>>>>
>>>>>> Regards,
>>>>>> Helen
>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> 1.
>>>>>>>>> https://lore.kernel.org/linux-media/20200522075522.6190-1-dafna.hirschfeld@collabora.com/
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Changes since v1:
>>>>>>>>>>      - All three patches rebased on latest media-tree.
>>>>>>>>>>      Patch 3:
>>>>>>>>>>      - Search for an entity with a non-NULL pipe instead of
>>>>>>>>>> searching
>>>>>>>>>>        for sensor. This terminates the search at output itself.
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> Kaaira Gupta (3):
>>>>>>>>>>     media: vimc: Add usage count to subdevices
>>>>>>>>>>     media: vimc: Serialize vimc_streamer_s_stream()
>>>>>>>>>>     media: vimc: Join pipeline if one already exists
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>>    .../media/test-drivers/vimc/vimc-capture.c    | 35
>>>>>>>>>> ++++++++++++++++++-
>>>>>>>>>>    .../media/test-drivers/vimc/vimc-debayer.c    |  8 +++++
>>>>>>>>>>    drivers/media/test-drivers/vimc/vimc-scaler.c |  8 +++++
>>>>>>>>>>    drivers/media/test-drivers/vimc/vimc-sensor.c |  9 ++++-
>>>>>>>>>>    .../media/test-drivers/vimc/vimc-streamer.c   | 23
>>>>>>>>>> +++++++-----
>>>>>>>>>>    5 files changed, 73 insertions(+), 10 deletions(-)
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>> -- 
>>>>>>>>>> 2.17.1
>>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>> -- 
>>>>>>>>> Regards,
>>>>>>>>> Niklas Söderlund
>>>>>>>
>>

-- 
Regards
--
Kieran