• Laurent Pinchart's avatar
    media: mc: entity: Rewrite media_pipeline_start() · ae219872
    Laurent Pinchart authored
    [Note: the code is mostly from Laurent but the patch description is from Tomi]
    
    The media_pipeline_start() and media_pipeline_stop() functions use the
    media graph walk API to traverse the graph and validate the pipeline.
    The graph walk traverses the media graph following links between the
    entities.
    
    Also, while the pipeline can't change between the start and stop calls,
    the graph is walked again from scratch at stop time, or any time a
    driver needs to inspect the pipeline.
    
    With the upcoming multiplexed streams support we will need a bit more
    intelligent pipeline construction, as e.g. two independent streams may
    be passing through a single entity via separate pads in which case
    those pads should not be part of the same pipeline.
    
    This patch essentially rewrites the media_pipeline_start/stop so that
    a pipeline is defined as a set of pads instead of entities and the media
    graph traversal considers the pad interdependencies when choosing which
    links to follow.
    
    Currently all the entity's pads are considered as interdependent. This
    means that the behavior with all the current drivers stays the same, but
    in the future we can define a more fine-grained pipeline construction.
    
    Additionally the media pipeline's pads are cached at
    media_pipeline_start() time, and re-used at media_pipeline_stop() which
    avoid the need to re-walk the whole graph as the previous implementation
    did.
    
    Also, caching pads in the pipeline can serve in the future as the
    foundation to provide a better API than the media graph walk to drivers
    to iterate over pads and entities in the pipeline.
    
    Note that the old media_pipeline_start/stop used the media graph walk
    API. The new version does not use the media graph walk API, but instead
    a new implementation.
    
    There are two reasons for not changing the graph walk: it proved to be
    rather difficult to change the graph walk to have the features
    implemented in this patch, and second, this keeps the backward
    compatibility of the graph walk as there are users of the graph walk API
    
    The long term plan is that all the existing code would be converted to
    use the new cached pipeline, thus allowing us to remove the graph walk.
    Signed-off-by: default avatarLaurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart+renesas@ideasonboard.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarTomi Valkeinen <tomi.valkeinen@ideasonboard.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarSakari Ailus <sakari.ailus@linux.intel.com>
    Signed-off-by: default avatarMauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@kernel.org>
    ae219872
mc-core.rst 12 KB