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Saturday, June 6, 2015

[Outreachy] The Virtual Media Controller in Linux Kernel

If you don't know what the Outreachy program is, you can check my last post.

About my project

My Outreachy project is about a Virtual Media Controller in the Linux Kernel. Thus, I'll be in contact with the Video4Linux (V4L2) API and the Media API.

My mentor ls Laurent Pinchart, you can find more information about the project here.

I have two main goals:

1) To provide a virtual media driver with a given topology* that simulate a real camera for example, similar to the Vivid driver, generating a fake image internally from the kernel. Thus it can be used by people who needs to implement and test a program which interacts with a media device without the need to posses the real equipment.

*A topology is an abstraction of how the hardware is organized. Depending on the hardware, it can have several internal functions like: a) one or more sensors which capture the image b) a filter c) the zoom
So the kernel can model this as a video pipe:

Sensor->Sepia Filter->2x Zoom->Data Bus

It is not necessarily a linear pipe, it could be like:

                                          ->Filter 1
                                        /                 \
Real life image ->Sensor                    -> Compose -> Zoom 2X -> Data Bus 1 -> Digital image 1
                                        \                 /
                                           ->Filter 2  -> Data Bus 2 -> Digital image 2


In this example we would be able to retrieve the image after the Zoom and the image directly from Filter 2 at the same time.

2) To provide a dynamically configurable topology API.

In some devices, the topology can be highly configurable (we could link the Zoom directly in the Filter 1 for example if we wanted too). But the current V4L2 API just allow a pre-configured link to be enabled or disabled. So the goal is to define this API and make the topology of the driver made in 1) configurable through user space.


You can follow how the development is going in my github kernel tree.

Any questions you can leave a comment or ping me on irc (my nick is koike) at freenode or gnome or oftc servers.

Cheers!

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