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kernel/linux-rt-4.4.41/Documentation/DocBook/media/v4l/media-controller.xml 3.84 KB
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  <partinfo>
    <authorgroup>
      <author>
        <firstname>Laurent</firstname>
        <surname>Pinchart</surname>
        <affiliation><address><email>laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com</email></address></affiliation>
        <contrib>Initial version.</contrib>
      </author>
    </authorgroup>
    <copyright>
      <year>2010</year>
      <holder>Laurent Pinchart</holder>
    </copyright>
  
    <revhistory>
      <!-- Put document revisions here, newest first. -->
      <revision>
        <revnumber>1.0.0</revnumber>
        <date>2010-11-10</date>
        <authorinitials>lp</authorinitials>
        <revremark>Initial revision</revremark>
      </revision>
    </revhistory>
  </partinfo>
  
  <title>Media Controller API</title>
  
  <chapter id="media_controller">
    <title>Media Controller</title>
  
    <section id="media-controller-intro">
      <title>Introduction</title>
      <para>Media devices increasingly handle multiple related functions. Many USB
      cameras include microphones, video capture hardware can also output video,
      or SoC camera interfaces also perform memory-to-memory operations similar to
      video codecs.</para>
      <para>Independent functions, even when implemented in the same hardware, can
      be modelled as separate devices. A USB camera with a microphone will be
      presented to userspace applications as V4L2 and ALSA capture devices. The
      devices' relationships (when using a webcam, end-users shouldn't have to
      manually select the associated USB microphone), while not made available
      directly to applications by the drivers, can usually be retrieved from
      sysfs.</para>
      <para>With more and more advanced SoC devices being introduced, the current
      approach will not scale. Device topologies are getting increasingly complex
      and can't always be represented by a tree structure. Hardware blocks are
      shared between different functions, creating dependencies between seemingly
      unrelated devices.</para>
      <para>Kernel abstraction APIs such as V4L2 and ALSA provide means for
      applications to access hardware parameters. As newer hardware expose an
      increasingly high number of those parameters, drivers need to guess what
      applications really require based on limited information, thereby
      implementing policies that belong to userspace.</para>
      <para>The media controller API aims at solving those problems.</para>
    </section>
  
    <section id="media-controller-model">
      <title>Media device model</title>
      <para>Discovering a device internal topology, and configuring it at runtime,
      is one of the goals of the media controller API. To achieve this, hardware
      devices are modelled as an oriented graph of building blocks called entities
      connected through pads.</para>
      <para>An entity is a basic media hardware or software building block. It can
      correspond to a large variety of logical blocks such as physical hardware
      devices (CMOS sensor for instance), logical hardware devices (a building
      block in a System-on-Chip image processing pipeline), DMA channels or
      physical connectors.</para>
      <para>A pad is a connection endpoint through which an entity can interact
      with other entities. Data (not restricted to video) produced by an entity
      flows from the entity's output to one or more entity inputs. Pads should not
      be confused with physical pins at chip boundaries.</para>
      <para>A link is a point-to-point oriented connection between two pads,
      either on the same entity or on different entities. Data flows from a source
      pad to a sink pad.</para>
    </section>
  </chapter>
  
  <appendix id="media-user-func">
    <title>Function Reference</title>
    <!-- Keep this alphabetically sorted. -->
    &sub-media-func-open;
    &sub-media-func-close;
    &sub-media-func-ioctl;
    <!-- All ioctls go here. -->
    &sub-media-ioc-device-info;
    &sub-media-ioc-enum-entities;
    &sub-media-ioc-enum-links;
    &sub-media-ioc-setup-link;
  </appendix>