test0r
a047926dbc
Tier 3E + 3F observability hardening from the libva-multiplanar
campaign Phase 6 follow-up. Improves diagnostic reliability for
future probes; no functional decode path change.
Tier 3E (cache-fix): patch-0010's CAPTURE Y-plane dump now calls
msync(p, 32, MS_SYNC|MS_INVALIDATE) before the read so userspace
sees what the kernel actually DMA-wrote, not a stale CPU cache
line. Without this, the previous version of the dump consistently
showed the patch-0011 sentinel (0xab) even when the kernel had
overwritten it — caused half a day of mistaken "kernel never wrote
the buffer" diagnosis. Also computes a luma min/max/variance
signal so a uniform fill (variance=0) is visually obvious vs
real pixel data (variance > 0).
Tier 3F (VIDIOC_G_EXT_CTRLS readback): after v4l2_set_controls
in h264_set_controls, reads back DECODE_PARAMS + PPS via
v4l2_get_controls (added by patch 0003) on the request fd.
Logs key fields:
dec.idr_pic_id, poc_lsb, refmark_bits, poc_bits — confirms
slice-header parser outputs landed in the V4L2 control batch.
dec.top_foc / bot_foc — confirms
patch-0015 POC sentinel strip actually applied (should NOT
show 65536 unless the strip mis-fired).
dec.frame_num — cross-checks
against VAAPI's pre-parsed frame_num (also already logged by
patch 0014).
pps.flags + (SMP=...) — confirms
SCALING_MATRIX_PRESENT bit set this build.
pps.refidx_l0/l1 — confirms
Tier 1B num_ref_idx writes landed.
Discriminates "we wrote X but kernel saw Y" from "we wrote zero
all along" — the failure mode the original patch series didn't
catch when slice-header bit_size fields were left zero.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
v4l2-request libVA Backend
About
This libVA backend is designed to work with the Linux Video4Linux2 Request API that is used by a number of video codecs drivers, including the Video Engine found in most Allwinner SoCs.
Status
The v4l2-request libVA backend currently supports the following formats:
- MPEG2 (Simple and Main profiles)
- H264 (Baseline, Main and High profiles)
- H265 (Main profile)
Instructions
In order to use this libVA backend, the v4l2_request driver has to
be specified through the LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME environment variable, as
such:
export LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=v4l2_request
A media player that supports VAAPI (such as VLC) can then be used to decode a video in a supported format:
vlc path/to/video.mpg
Sample media files can be obtained from:
http://samplemedia.linaro.org/MPEG2/
http://samplemedia.linaro.org/MPEG4/SVT/
Technical Notes
Surface
A Surface is an internal data structure never handled by the VA's user containing the output of a rendering. Usualy, a bunch of surfaces are created at the begining of decoding and they are then used alternatively. When created, a surface is assigned a corresponding v4l capture buffer and it is kept until the end of decoding. Syncing a surface waits for the v4l buffer to be available and then dequeue it.
Note: since a Surface is kept private from the VA's user, it can ask to directly render a Surface on screen in an X Drawable. Some kind of implementation is available in PutSurface but this is only for development purpose.
Context
A Context is a global data structure used for rendering a video of a certain format. When a context is created, input buffers are created and v4l's output (which is the compressed data input queue, since capture is the real output) format is set.
Picture
A Picture is an encoded input frame made of several buffers. A single input can contain slice data, headers and IQ matrix. Each Picture is assigned a request ID when created and each corresponding buffer might be turned into a v4l buffers or extended control when rendered. Finally they are submitted to kernel space when reaching EndPicture.
The real rendering is done in EndPicture instead of RenderPicture because the v4l2 driver expects to have the full corresponding extended control when a buffer is queued and we don't know in which order the different RenderPicture will be called.
Image
An Image is a standard data structure containing rendered frames in a usable pixel format. Here we only use NV12 buffers which are converted from sunxi's proprietary tiled pixel format with tiled_yuv when deriving an Image from a Surface.