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authorLaurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com>2009-12-09 08:40:00 -0300
committerMauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@redhat.com>2011-03-22 04:53:10 -0300
commit53e269c102fbaf77e7dc526b1606ad4a48e57200 (patch)
treec264a16d8058e5331ac3c0c4792be30da50e7363 /Documentation/DocBook/v4l
parent176fb0d108f7495ccf9aa127e1342a1a0d87e004 (diff)
[media] media: Entities, pads and links
As video hardware pipelines become increasingly complex and configurable, the current hardware description through v4l2 subdevices reaches its limits. In addition to enumerating and configuring subdevices, video camera drivers need a way to discover and modify at runtime how those subdevices are connected. This is done through new elements called entities, pads and links. An entity is a basic media hardware 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. 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. 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. Links are stored in the source entity. To make backwards graph walk faster, a copy of all links is also stored in the sink entity. The copy is known as a backlink and is only used to help graph traversal. The entity API is made of three functions: - media_entity_init() initializes an entity. The caller must provide an array of pads as well as an estimated number of links. The links array is allocated dynamically and will be reallocated if it grows beyond the initial estimate. - media_entity_cleanup() frees resources allocated for an entity. It must be called during the cleanup phase after unregistering the entity and before freeing it. - media_entity_create_link() creates a link between two entities. An entry in the link array of each entity is allocated and stores pointers to source and sink pads. When a media device is unregistered, all its entities are unregistered automatically. The code is based on Hans Verkuil <hverkuil@xs4all.nl> initial work. Signed-off-by: Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart@ideasonboard.com> Signed-off-by: Sakari Ailus <sakari.ailus@iki.fi> Acked-by: Hans Verkuil <hverkuil@xs4all.nl> Signed-off-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@redhat.com>
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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>