Dave Airlie Linux Graphics blog

I was interested in how much work a vaapi on top of vulkan video proof of concept would be. My main reason for being interested is actually video encoding, there is no good vulkan video encoding demo yet, and I'm not experienced enough in the area to write one, but I can hack stuff. I think it is probably easier to hack a vaapi encode to vulkan video encode than write a demo app myself. With that in mind I decided to see what decode would look like first. I talked to Mike B (most famous zink author) before he left for holidays, then I ignored everything he told me and wrote a super hack. This morning I convinced zink vaapi on top anv with iris GL doing the presents in mpv to show me some useful frames of video. However zink vaapi on anv with zink GL is failing miserably (well green jellyfish). I'm not sure how much more I'll push on the decode side at this stage, I really wanted it to validate the driver side code, and I've found a few bugs in there already. The WIP hac...

Previously I mentioned having AMD VCN h264 support. Today I added initial support for the older UVD engine[1]. This is found on chips from Vega back to SI. I've only tested it on my Vega so far. I also worked out the "correct" answer to the how to I send the reset command correctly, however the nvidia player I'm using as a demo doesn't do things that way yet, so I've forked it for now[2]. The answer is to use vkCmdControlVideoCodingKHR to send a reset the first type a session is used. However I can't see how the app is meant to know this is necessary, but I've asked the appropriate people. The initial anv branch I mentioned last week is now here[3]. [1] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/airlied/mesa/-/commits/radv-vulkan-video-uvd-h264 [2] https://github.com/airlied/vk_video_samples/tree/radv-fixes [3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/airlied/mesa/-/tree/anv-vulkan-video-prelim-decode

Last week I mentioned I had the basics of h264 decode using the proposed vulkan video on radv. This week I attempted to do the same thing with Intel's Mesa vulkan driver "anv". Now I'd previously unsuccessfully tried to get vaapi on crocus working but got sidetracked back into other projects. The Intel h264 decoder hasn't changed a lot between ivb/hsw/gen8/gen9 era. I ported what I had from crocus to anv and started trying to get something to decode on my WhiskeyLake. I wrote the code pretty early on, figured out all the things I had to send the hardware. The first anv side bridge to cross was Vulkan is doing H264 Picture level decode API, so it means you get handed the encoded slice data. However to program the Intel hw you need to decode the slice header. I wrote a slice header decoder in some common code. The other thing you need to give the intel hw is a number of bits of slice header, which in some encoding schemes is rounded to bytes and in some isn't. S...

A few weeks ago I watched Victor's excellent talk on Vulkan Video . This made me question my skills in this area. I'm pretty vague on video processing hardware, I really have no understanding of H264 or any of the standards. I've been loosely following the Vulkan video group inside of Khronos, but I can't say I've understood it or been useful. radeonsi has a gallium vaapi driver, that talks to firmware driver encoder on the hardware, surely copying what it is programming can't be that hard. I got an mpv/vaapi setup running and tested some videos on that setup just to get comfortable. I looked at what sort of data was being pushed about. The thing is the firmware is doing all the work here, the driver is mostly just responsible for taking semi-parsed h264 bitstream data structures and giving them in memory buffers to the fw API. Then the resulting decoded image should be magically in a buffer. I then got the demo nvidia video decoder application mentioned in Vict...