does a Upnp stop command to a renderer stop immediately - audio

Is the Upnp stop command supposed to stop a renderer immediately or is it supposed to empty the buffer first and then stop the renderer?

Assuming you're asking about the Stop action on the AVTransport service, precise behaviour is undefined.
UPnP-av-AVTransport-v1-Service-20020625.pdf from the UPnP Forum docs bundle says the following about Stop:
This action stops the progression of the current resource that is
associated with the specified instance. Additionally, it is
recommended that the “output of the device” (defined below) should
change to something other than the current snippet of resource.
Although the exact nature of this change varies from device to device,
a common behavior is to immediately cease all “output” from the
device. Nevertheless, the exact behavior is defined by the
manufacturer of the device
There is no specification for how quickly progression of the current resource stops. This means that it is possible (and valid) for a device to play some/all of its buffered content before stopping.
If you are implementing a renderer, you should probably make reasonable efforts to discard at least some of your buffered content when Stop is invoked. If you are writing a control point, you can't make any assumptions in general. (You probably also don't care exactly how a device implements the action though.)
There may be further guarantees offered if you limit yourself to dealing with devices which are DLNA compatible. DLNA specs are not freely available so I can't say whether they mandate any particular interpretation of the AVTransport spec.

Related

vulkan barriers and multi-threading

I want to share my thoughts about how to keep memory barriers in sync in multi-threading rendering. Please let me know if my thoughts about Vulkan memory barrier is wrong or if my current plan makes any sense. I don't have anyone at work to discuss with, so I'll ask here for help.
For resources in Vulkan, when I set memory barriers for them among drawcalls, I need to set both srcAccessMask and dst AccessMask. This is simple for single threaded rendering. But for multi-threading rendering, it gets complicated. dst AccessMask is not a problem, since we always know what the resource is going to be used for. But for srcAccessMask, when one command buffer tries to read the current access mask of some resource, there might be other command buffers changing it to something else. So my current thoughts of solving it is:
Each resource keeps its own state, I'll only update the state right before submitting command buffers to command queue, I will describe it later. Each command buffer maintains tracking record of how the resource state changed inside it. Doing this way, within the same command buffer the access state of each resource is clear, the only problem is the beginning state of the resource for each command buffer.
When submitting multiple command buffers to execute, as the order of command buffers are fixed now, I check the tracking record of each resource among all command buffers, update resource's state based on the end state of the resource in each command buffer, and use that to correct the beginning state of the same resource in each command buffer's tracking record.
Then I need to either insert a new command buffer to have extra memory barrier to transition resource to correct state for the first command buffer, or insert memory barrier into previous command buffer for the rest command buffers.When all these are done, I can finally submit the command buffers together as a batch.
Do these make sense to you? Are there better solutions to solve it? Or do we even need to solve the "synchronization" issue of access state for each resource?
Thank you for your time
What you're talking about only makes sense in a world where none of these rendering operations have even the slightest idea what's going on elsewhere. Where the consumer of an image has no idea how the data in the image got there. Which probably means that it doesn't really know what that image means conceptually.
Vulkan is a low-level API. The idea is that you can connect the high-level concepts of your rendering system directly to Vulkan. So at a high level, you know that resource X has meaning Y and in this frame will have its data generated from operation Z. Not because of something stored in resource X but because it is resource X; that's what resource X is for. So both the operation generating it and the operation consuming it know what's going on and how it got there.
For example, if you're doing deferred rendering and SSAO, then your SSAO renderpass knows that the texture containing the depth buffer had its values generated by rendering. The depth buffer doesn't need something stored in it to say that; that's simply the nature of your rendering. It's hard-coded to work that way.
Most of your resource dependencies are (or ought to be) that way.
If you're doing some render-to-texture operation via the framebuffer, then the consumer probably doesn't even need to know about the dependency. You can just set an appropriate external dependency for the renderpass and the subpass that generates it. And you probably know why you did the render-to-texture op, and you probably know where it's going. If you're doing RTT for reflection, you know that the destination will be some kind of shader stage texture fetch. And if you don't know how it's going to be used, then you can just be safe and set all of the destination stage bits.
What you're talking about makes some degree of sense if you're dealing with streamed objects, where objects are popping into and outof memory with some regularity. But even then, that's not really a property of each individual resource.
When you load a streamed chunk, you upload its data by generating command buffer(s) and submitting them. And here's where we have an implementation-specific divergence. Your best bet for performance is to execute these CBs on a queue dedicated for transfer operations. But since Vulkan doesn't guarantee all implementations have those, you need to be able to deliver those transfer CBs to the main rendering queue.
So you need a way to communicate to rendering threads when they can expect to start being able to use the resources. But even that doesn't need to be on a per-resource basis; they can be told "stuff from block X is available", and then they can start using it.
Furthermore, that implementation divergence becomes important. See, if it's done on another queue, a barrier isn't the right synchronization primitive. Your rendering CBs now have to have their submitted batches wait on a semaphore. And that semaphore should handle all of the synchronization needs of the memory (ie: the destination bits being everything). So in the implementation where the transfer CBs are executed on the same queue as your rendering CBs, you may as well save yourself some trouble and issue a single barrier at the end of the transfer CB that makes all of the given resources available to all stages.
So as previously stated, this kind of automated system is only useful if you have no real control over the structure of rendering. This would principally be true if you're writing some kind of middleware, where the higher-level code defines the structure of rendering. However, if that's the case, Vulkan probably isn't the right tool for that job.

inotify: are the events reported in strictly the same order as they have occured in the file system?

I'm using inotify to monitor various directories on various partitions (which are possibly located on different hard disks). To be sure to have collected all events which have occurred until a certain point in time T, I'm touching a special file in my home directory and wait for inotify to report this modification. Once I've received this notification, can I be sure that I've also received all events for all modifications before T (for all directories and all partitions)?
I'm uncertain about whether this works for watches on different filesystems on the same inotify instance, but can speak with authority that the technique does work in general: we use it in Watchman (we describe it here: https://facebook.github.io/watchman/docs/cookies.html)
We assumed that this wouldn't be ordered correctly across filesystem boundaries and create one instance per watched root; this makes it simpler for us to track and associate events properly. We also have to deal with fsevents, kqueue and other watching implementations, so we try to avoid coupling too closely to the underlying implementation.
Depending on what your precise use case is, you may be able to get away with one instance per filesystem and touch a special file in the root of each at your time T. Provided that you've observed both of your special file changes, you know you've seen everything up to time T, and perhaps a little more. If the "perhaps a little more" part isn't a deal breaker then you're golden.
The inotify documentation in the kernel says "that each [inotify] instance is associated with a unique, ordered queue." So, I think that events related to the watches added to a given instance (created with inotify_init()) are received in the same order they occur.

how uevents get triggered in kernel

uevents has been sent from kernel space to user space through netlink socket.
In kernel, there must be something trigger uevent.
I guess there are two possibilities:
Hardware interrupt - this means, once hardware interruption happened, kernel sends event to user space to signal that there is some events happened.
software polling - this means, there is always a daemon to check these file system to see if there is anything changed. If so, then update these info to upper layer.
Could anyone provide your feedback?
Thanks
I can't agree with you about polling. uevent is event-based, so there is no polling.
Triggering uevent happened in many cases and I would rather start with figuring out what uevent types are exist?
Little searching and here you go - in include/linux/kobject.h
enum kobject_action {
KOBJ_ADD,
KOBJ_REMOVE,
KOBJ_CHANGE,
KOBJ_MOVE,
KOBJ_ONLINE,
KOBJ_OFFLINE,
KOBJ_MAX
};
So it's
Add event
Remove event
Change event
Move event
Online event
Offline event
KOBJ_MAX is special and marks and of enum.
There are 2 functions that actually sends uevent - kobject_uevent and kobject_uevent_env. These functions are called with on of the actions listed above.
Finally, to answer your questions. There are no predefined cases that will trigger uevent. If you search for calls of kobject_uevent and kobject_uevent_env you will see that it's happens in various callbacks in different unrelated kernel subsystems.
uevent is kernel facility to unify notifications from various unrelated drivers. So I think there are no well known list of things that will trigger uevent.

Draw on top of suspended full-screen Direct3D app

Currently, I am able to hook onto Direct3D application and draw custom stuff onto its surface. However, I would like to suspend this application and then draw something else.
Is this even remotely possible to do so? Like creating another my own Direct3D window on top of that application?
I'm targetting only Windows 7, but the application I want to draw on is using only DirectX 9.
The problem is that I have very little experience with DirectX in general.
Sort of.
You're working with two different elements here, one quite large and but not particularly complex: hooking D3D. The other ("suspending" the app) is simple within that, but you don't quite want what you think you want.
To hook D3D, by the simplest method, you need to intercept the call to CreateDirect3D9 and return your own IDirect3D9, which later creates and returns your own IDirect3DDevice9. This will give you full control over the app's render process.
In order to "suspend" it, you need to wait for the desired trigger, then in your IDirect3DDevice9::Present, call your own event loop. This will, for all intents and purposes, suspend execution of the original app's code, but not the process itself (allowing your code and event loop to process). There will be some limitations of this, and you may not be able to consume window/Windows events (simply), but it will give you full control and effectively pause the original app.
Note, however, that you must intercept and reroute execution in every thread you want to "suspend," it's only specific to a single thread and you don't want physics or AI crunching on while render and UI are paused.
You need to perform your overlay drawing, whatever that may be, during your loop or your IDirect3DDevice9::Present hook, then call the real device's Present method as needed. If you want to run multiple frames of your overlay, then call the real Present repeatedly before returning from your Present. Tweak as necessary. Rendering here is done pretty much normally (check out general D3D tutorials for that), but there is one major catch: the device's state is unknown and may be incompatible, but must be "untouched" on return. This is handled simply by caching an IDirect3DStateBlock9 created from the device immediately after creating it. In your Present hook, create another state block with the state on entrance, restore the clean state block, run your code, then restore the entrance state block. You can work with any states, off a fresh slate, without damaging the device's state (I use this in practice, in works great).
If you want some rather extensive examples of how this works, I'd suggest checking out the Voodoo Shader project, which has full D3D8 and 9 hooks, including everything needed for overlays [/shameless own-project promotion]. Feel free to reuse any of the concepts, or comment with further questions; this certainly isn't all the details that may be useful to you.
This is a very complex thing to accomplish, as it is very much a hack to do so. The only people you see doing such things are steam, teamspeak, xfire, fraps, and a few hard-core devs.
There are kits out on the internet that show you have to inject a DLL into the memory space of the target application to achieve such a feat, and methods such as proxy DLLs.
Proxy DLL:
http://www.codeguru.com/cpp/g-m/directx/directx8/article.php/c11453
Injection:
http://www.progamercity.net/d3d/372-c-directx9-0-hooking-via-detours.html
Good luck, this will take you a while.

drop/rewrite/generate keyboard events under Linux

I would like to hook into, intercept, and generate keyboard (make/break) events under Linux before they get delivered to any application. More precisely, I want to detect patterns in the key event stream and be able to discard/insert events into the stream depending on the detected patterns.
I've seen some related questions on SO, but:
either they only deal with how to get at the key events (key loggers etc.), and not how to manipulate the propagation of them (they only listen, but don't intercept/generate).
or they use passive/active grabs in X (read more on that below).
A Small DSL
I explain the problem below, but to make it a bit more compact and understandable, first a small DSL definition.
A_: for make (press) key A
A^: for break (release) key A
A^->[C_,C^,U_,U^]: on A^ send a make/break combo for C and then U further down the processing chain (and finally to the application). If there is no -> then there's nothing sent (but internal state might be modified to detect subsequent events).
$X: execute an arbitrary action. This can be sending some configurable key event sequence (maybe something like C-x C-s for emacs), or execute a function. If I can only send key events, that would be enough, as I can then further process these in a window manager depending on which application is active.
Problem Description
Ok, so with this notation, here are the patterns I want to detect and what events I want to pass on down the processing chain.
A_, A^->[A_,A^]: expl. see above, note that the send happens on A^.
A_, B_, A^->[A_,A^], B^->[B_,B^]: basically the same as 1. but overlapping events don't change the processing flow.
A_, B_, B^->[$X], A^: if there was a complete make/break of a key (B) while another key was held (A), X is executed (see above), and the break of A is discarded.
(it's in principle a simple statemachine implemented over key events, which can generate (multiple) key events as output).
Additional Notes
The solution has to work at typing speed.
Consumers of the modified key event stream run under X on Linux (consoles, browsers, editors, etc.).
Only keyboard events influence the processing (no mouse etc.)
Matching can happen on keysyms (a bit easier), or keycodes (a bit harder). With the latter, I will just have to read in the mapping to translate from code to keysym.
If possible, I'd prefer a solution that works with both USB keyboards as well as inside a virtual machine (could be a problem if working at the driver layer, other layers should be ok).
I'm pretty open about the implementation language.
Possible Solutions and Questions
So the basic question is how to implement this.
I have implemented a solution in a window manager using passive grabs (XGrabKey) and XSendEvent. Unfortunately passive grabs don't work in this case as they don't capture correctly B^ in the second pattern above. The reason is that the converted grab ends on A^ and is not continued to B^. A new grab is converted to capture B if still held but only after ~1 sec. Otherwise a plain B^ is sent to the application. This can be verified with xev.
I could convert my implementation to use an active grab (XGrabKeyboard), but I'm not sure about the effect on other applications if the window manager has an active grab on the keyboard all the time. X documentation refers to active grabs as being intrusive and designed for short term use. If someone has experience with this and there are no major drawbacks with longterm active grabs, then I'd consider this a solution.
I'm willing to look at other layers of key event processing besides window managers (which operate as X clients). Keyboard drivers or mappings are a possibility as long as I can solve the above problem with them. This also implies that the solution doesn't have to be a separate application. I'm perfectly fine to have a driver or kernel module do this for me. Be aware though that I have never done any kernel or driver programming, so I would appreciate some good resources.
Thanks for any pointers!
Use XInput2 to make device(keyboard) floating, then monitor KeyPress and KeyRelease event on the device, using XTest to regenerate KeyPress & KeyRelease event.

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