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.
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 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 ;)
@pavel That said, rendering to a linear buffer can be slower, that's expected. The question is whether gains from passing buffers around for free are higher, which for an actual "record video from a camera" use case will almost certainly be true (and which has very different performance characteristics from reading images from files - you can't directly attach a file as a texture).
