Commit 4cfe98e6 authored by Alexandre Courbot's avatar Alexandre Courbot Committed by Mauro Carvalho Chehab
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media: docs: dev-decoder: add restrictions about CAPTURE buffers



CAPTURE buffers might be read by the hardware after they are dequeued,
which goes against the general idea that userspace has full control over
dequeued buffers. Explain why and document the restrictions that this
implies for userspace.

Signed-off-by: default avatarAlexandre Courbot <acourbot@chromium.org>
Acked-by: default avatarTomasz Figa <tfiga@chromium.org>
Signed-off-by: default avatarHans Verkuil <hverkuil-cisco@xs4all.nl>
Signed-off-by: default avatarMauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab+huawei@kernel.org>
parent ef054e34
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Original line number Diff line number Diff line
@@ -752,6 +752,23 @@ available to dequeue. Specifically:
     buffers are out-of-order compared to the ``OUTPUT`` buffers): ``CAPTURE``
     timestamps will not retain the order of ``OUTPUT`` timestamps.

.. note::

   The backing memory of ``CAPTURE`` buffers that are used as reference frames
   by the stream may be read by the hardware even after they are dequeued.
   Consequently, the client should avoid writing into this memory while the
   ``CAPTURE`` queue is streaming. Failure to observe this may result in
   corruption of decoded frames.

   Similarly, when using a memory type other than ``V4L2_MEMORY_MMAP``, the
   client should make sure that each ``CAPTURE`` buffer is always queued with
   the same backing memory for as long as the ``CAPTURE`` queue is streaming.
   The reason for this is that V4L2 buffer indices can be used by drivers to
   identify frames. Thus, if the backing memory of a reference frame is
   submitted under a different buffer ID, the driver may misidentify it and
   decode a new frame into it while it is still in use, resulting in corruption
   of the following frames.

During the decoding, the decoder may initiate one of the special sequences, as
listed below. The sequences will result in the decoder returning all the
``CAPTURE`` buffers that originated from all the ``OUTPUT`` buffers processed