community needs your help.
We are trying record video, and have most pieces working, but one is
missing: fast enough debayering. That means about 23MB/sec on #librem5.
Debayering is not hard; camera images have subpixels split on two
lines, which need to be corrected. They also use different color
representation, but that's fixable by some table lookup and two matrix
multiplies.
Librem 5 has Vivante GPU, 4 in-order CPU cores and 3GB RAM. My feeling
is that it should be fast enough for that. If task is for some reason
impossible, that would be good to know, too.
Image data looks like this
RGRGRG...
xBxBxB...
.........
.........
Task is to turn that into usual rgbrgb.... format. rgb = RGB * color
matrix, with table lookups for better quality. I can fix that once I
get an example.
I'm looking for example code (#pinephone would work, too), reasons it
can not be done... and boosts if you have friends that can program
GPUs. #gpu #opensource
@dos @pavel
adding to that, what data type is the image data (float, int, ???) and what data type is expected to come out?
instead of trying to outsource to the GPU, have you considered SIMD? (I assume librem5 and pinephone support NEON)
if the GPU is better suited, another question is whether there's support for compute shaders on the respective GPUs (what is the supported OpenGL version, assuming there is no Vulkan support on these devices)
@tizilogic @pavel It's either 8-bit int, or 10-bit int stored as 16-bit.
GC7000L supports compute shaders, but etnaviv isn't there yet.
Naive debayering is easy, but for good picture quality you need much more than that.
GL versions are:
Vendor: etnaviv
Renderer: Vivante GC7000 rev 6214
OpenGL Version: OpenGL ES 2.0 Mesa 21.2.6
GLSL Version: OpenGL ES GLSL ES 1.0.16
Doing input in u8, with output in u8 and internal computation in u16 fixed point should be "good enough". Doing everything in u16 would be even better. Floats are okay, too.
Here's huge problem with v4l, which gives uncached memory buffers to userspace. That means one whole CPU core is dedicated to copying that to "normal" memory. If that is ever solved, yes, other optimalizations are possible. Currently, this means it is not even possible to copy anything bigger than 1Mpix out of the v4l.
@pavel I'm confused. V4L lets you stream to a CMA dmabuf which should be importable as GL_TEXTURE_EXTERNAL_OES, right? Or am I missing something?
@pavel Megapixels is not an example of how to do things in the most performant way :) OpenGL operates in a VRAM-centric model, it's very copy-heavy. We don't need to copy things around, as our GPUs operate on the exact same memory CPUs do.
See GL_OES_EGL_image_external and https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/media/v4l/dmabuf.html
I'd need working example here. I got surprisingly far vibecoding this, but even robots have their limits.
@pavel After eliminating glReadPixels and having the output buffer mmaped instead: "18.9 MB in 0.08s = 244.4 MB/s"
After putting glTexImage2D out of the loop to emulate zero-copy import from V4L as well:
"18.9 MB in 0.05s = 400.1 MB/s"
@pavel Not only you had copies in- and out- of GLES context there, but these copies were sequential - and your benchmark waited until things were copied before proceeding with the next frame, so it was pretty much useless in assessing GPU performance. In practice, GStreamer can happily encode the previous frame while the GPU is busy with the current one, all while CSI controller is already receiving the next one.
@pavel Also, it gets faster when you increase the buffer size, because rendering is so fast you're mostly measuring API overhead 😁
With full 13MP frames: 315.1 MB in 0.62s = 511.3 MB/s
@pavel On 9f076a5, I'm getting 88MB/s with one green channel, 82MB/s with two and 105MB/s with nothing but static gl_FragColor. The three copies it does could be eliminated and I believe texelFetch could make it slightly faster on the GPU side too.
@pavel Since I assume you're going to want to pass the rendered image into some kind of video encoder, you may want to make sure that you match stride and alignment requirements with your target buffer so etnaviv will be able to perform linear rendering rather than de-tile it afterwards (though IIRC it's currently gated behind ETNA_MESA_DEBUG).