Can you program GPUs and do you want to become a HERO? #linuxphone
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

@pavel No, it's

RGRGRG
GBGBGB

You lose meaningful data if you ignore half of green pixels.

I see no reason why it couldn't be done. Just take care not to introduce needless copies in your processing path. dmabufs are your friends.

@dos As for copies... Yes, I'm currently doing more copies than needed. I measured Librem 5 at about 2GB/sec memory bandwidth, and stream is about 30MB/sec. At 1Mpix/24fps resolution, gstreamer should be able to encode it in real time.

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?

@dos If you have example of that, that would be welcome :-). That's not how megapixels work, at least.

@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

@dos Sorry, hero, that's dark magic behind my understanding. I see the words but don't understand the sentences. :-(

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"

https://dosowisko.net/stuff/bwtest.patch

@dos Thanks for a patch. And yes, it makes the loop faster.. if you don't actually use the data. When used for loading/saving 720 images from the ramdisk, speed went from ~16 sec to ~21 sec.

@pavel I left the memcpy line commented out for a reason - with it uncommented, the result is exactly the same as with glReadPixels (which is effectively a memcpy on steroids). The point is to pass that buffer to the encoder directly, so it can read the data straight from the output buffer without waiting for memcpy to conclude.

I've also verified that the approach is sound by having the shader output different values each frame and accessing it via hexdump_pixels inside the loop. Still fast ;)

@dos But you only hexdumped first few pixels, right?

Is that buffer uncached or something?

I pushed current code to https://gitlab.com/tui/debayer-gpu .

Yes, with memcpy(), I'm getting same results as before. If I get rid of the memcpy(), and attempt to fwrite() the buffer directly, things actually slow down.

I can't easily connect gstreamer to that, I'm going through ramdisk for now. I'm using time ./ocam.py debayer for testing -- https://gitlab.com/tui/tui/-/blob/master/ucam/ocam.py?ref_type=heads

@pavel > I can't easily connect gstreamer to that

Why not? I quickly hacked up passing dma-bufs to GStreamer and even though I'm glFinishing and busy-waiting on a frame to get encoded sequentially it still manages to encode a 526x390 h264 stream in real time on L5.

@pavel Plugged it into V4L2 - with a caveat that for now I fed the GPU full-res 13MP frames to meet stride alignment requirement (the shader output is still 526x390). It says it does 240 frames in 10.55s. I wonder if it's really slightly too slow, or just bad timing from our camera stack :)

@dos Camera is 23.5 FPS, IIRC. Do you have it under version control somewhere? This is a bit of achievement :-).

@pavel https://paste.debian.net/1384224/

It's ugly, hardcodes everything, lies on frame timing, occasionally segfaults. Most of it is copied straight from LLM, I just massaged the pieces to work together. Not the kind of code I'd like to sign off on :) But it's a working example, so have fun with it.

@pavel The first thing to do to improve it (after cleaning it up) would be to actually make use of the buffer pool. Dequeue the buffer, attach it as a texture, kick off rendering, get a fence and pass it with the output buffer to GStreamer without waiting on rendering to finish, then queue it back asynchronously once rendering is done. This should allow for much more complex shaders than this sequential code does.

@pavel BTW. The fact that I could stream full-res frames and bin them down in the shader at real time is an interesting news, as this may open up possibility to use phase detection autofocus.

@dos Exactly. That's a bit of big deal. That's why I'm trying to make sure this code does not go away. I had phase-detection auto-focus working at one point, but decided it is unusable as I did not see a way to scale down images quickly enough.

Plus it also adds possibility of zooming.

@pavel There's plenty of low-hanging fruits in there. Higher frame rates and 10-bit output are also likely some debugging session or two away 😜