claude-noether
988b848908
Closes three internal carry items in one fork commit. iter6 deferred
these as TODOs; iter7 lands the implementations + supporting tests.
# Track B — slot-leak error recovery (src/)
iter6 documented the RequestSyncSurface error paths as a "bounded
leak we accept" — slots stayed busy=true after REINIT/DQBUF failures
until RequestTerminate ran. With pool=16 and rare errors this was
acceptable, but a sustained-error scenario could starve the pool.
Adds request_pool_force_release(pool, index) which:
1. Tries media_request_reinit on the slot's fd (cheap path)
2. Falls back to close + media_request_alloc (recovery)
3. Leaves the slot dead-busy if even alloc fails (other slots
unaffected, pool capacity reduced by 1 until destroy)
Wires it into surface.c RequestSyncSurface error paths only for
errors before the OUTPUT-DQBUF attempt. After OUTPUT-DQBUF failure
the V4L2 buffer is in indeterminate kernel state, so a separate
error label (`error_buffer_indeterminate`) leaves the slot
dead-busy — reusing the slot would QBUF on a kernel-still-held
buffer and EINVAL.
Phase 5 sonnet review caught this discriminator subtlety pre-commit.
Files: request_pool.{h,c}, surface.c.
# Track C — cap_pool race synthetic harness (tests/)
iter5 sonnet C4 / iter6 candidate A: cap_pool resolution-change
race was organically exercised by YT's quality renegotiations
(iter6 close, 4 cap_pool_init events clean) but had no
deterministic regression test.
tests/cap_pool_probe_pattern.c — ~170-line C program: opens
libva display, vaCreateConfig, vaCreateSurfaces(small) +
vaCreateContext (triggers OUTPUT pool init at small resolution),
dispose, vaCreateSurfaces(big) + vaCreateContext (forces S_FMT
on the new resolution against an in-use OUTPUT pool — the actual
race-hitting path).
Phase 5 sonnet flagged that without vaCreateContext the test
would pass trivially (OUTPUT pool never init'd, REQBUFS(0) on
empty queue is a no-op). Fixed before commit.
tests/run_cap_pool_probe.sh — runner; greps driver stderr for
REQBUFS / EBUSY / "Unable to set format" race indicators.
# Track A — msync pixel-correctness verify harness (tests/)
iter5 sweep removed msync(MS_SYNC|MS_INVALIDATE) from CAPTURE
DQBUF path. iter5 sonnet C3 flagged: no formal pixel verification.
tests/run_msync_pixel_verify.sh — runs FFmpeg SW decode (libavcodec
reference) and FFmpeg HW decode (via our v4l2_request driver),
compares NV12 byte streams. Probes fixture dimensions via ffprobe
and uses crop=$W:$H after hwdownload to normalize MB-padding
artifacts (hantro pads height to 16-line align; SW returns
crop-aligned).
Phase 5 sonnet flagged the stride-mismatch false-failure risk
pre-commit. Fixed: explicit crop + diagnostic that distinguishes
genuine pixel divergence from MB-padding stride artifacts.
# Phase 5 sonnet code review
Verdict: APPROVE-WITH-CHANGES. Three actionable findings, all
addressed before this commit:
1. surface.c error path: separated OUTPUT-DQBUF-failure into
error_buffer_indeterminate label, slot stays dead-busy
2. cap_pool_probe_pattern.c: added vaCreateContext to actually
exercise the OUTPUT pool init at the small resolution
3. run_msync_pixel_verify.sh: explicit crop on HW path,
stride-mismatch diagnostic distinguished from corruption
Empirical verification (Phase 6+7 deploy + run): pending operator
ohm-tools availability.
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.