Nowadays, multimedia processing is required in a large class of application domains, including embedded applications for automotive infotainment or medical imaging. Thus, silicon vendors have been producing embedded systems with powerful and ever-increasing multimedia capabilities. As a consequence, many embedded systems have become complex parallel machines, often capable of hybrid hardware parallelism. On the other side, multimedia frameworks are usually developed for more traditional desktop machines, so there is a potential performance gap: the software, the programmer or both could not be able to exploit all available parallelism. In this paper we focus on a particular open source multimedia framework, GStreamer, which has already proved as a viable solution in different embedded contexts. First we thoroughly analyze the GStreamer parallelism model. We discuss both its threading model and its hardware matching capabilities. Then we analyze how GStreamer model suites typical embedded machines. Finally, we discuss how a developer can exploit parallelism within the GStreamer framework, and especially how much of this work can be done automatically. In the last section we offer some ideas for further analysis and future research goals.

PARALLELISM IN EMBEDDED MULTIMEDIA FRAMEWORKS: an assessment

FERRETTI, MARCO;MUSCI, MIRTO
2012-01-01

Abstract

Nowadays, multimedia processing is required in a large class of application domains, including embedded applications for automotive infotainment or medical imaging. Thus, silicon vendors have been producing embedded systems with powerful and ever-increasing multimedia capabilities. As a consequence, many embedded systems have become complex parallel machines, often capable of hybrid hardware parallelism. On the other side, multimedia frameworks are usually developed for more traditional desktop machines, so there is a potential performance gap: the software, the programmer or both could not be able to exploit all available parallelism. In this paper we focus on a particular open source multimedia framework, GStreamer, which has already proved as a viable solution in different embedded contexts. First we thoroughly analyze the GStreamer parallelism model. We discuss both its threading model and its hardware matching capabilities. Then we analyze how GStreamer model suites typical embedded machines. Finally, we discuss how a developer can exploit parallelism within the GStreamer framework, and especially how much of this work can be done automatically. In the last section we offer some ideas for further analysis and future research goals.
2012
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11571/602213
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