[RFC] IKVM prototype with only video

[RFC] IKVM prototype with only video

[Eddie James]

Hi all,

I've been working on IKVM for OpenBMC and thought I would share my 
progress for any feedback. I have a working driver for the AST2500 video 
engine, and a functional view-only vnc server that runs on the BMC. This 
can be used to view the host graphics output (though it's not very 
interesting, just a login screen since I don't have any input working 
yet). I have it running at 24 fps, using ~2.8 Mbps network (the jpegs 
are about 15KB, x24 -> 380KB/s).

Here's the gerrit entry with everything: 
https://gerrit.openbmc-project.xyz/#/c/11206/

Here's my linux tree with the driver, in a pretty messy state. I wasn't 
able to get the streaming interface working with video4linux2, due to 
complications with how AST2500 engine handles the buffers, but 
performance isn't bad with basic read calls. The engine stays running 
and read() just grabs the latest frame. 
https://github.com/eddiejames/linux/commit/94b4c9b76d9ec58c5cc08527ca203741f17929c9

And here's the vnc server, which does require a small extension to 
libvncserver in order to transfer raw jpegs, and of course all the vnc 
code to only transfer changed blocks isn't used at all. 
https://github.com/eddiejames/obmc-ikvm

Let me know if anyone has any thoughts! Will work on getting input 
working next.

Thanks,

Eddie

Re: [RFC] IKVM prototype with only video

[Avi Fishman]

Hi all,

Nuvoton NPCM7xx has a standard VNC server application that can be used
by any VNC client, it can support any SW based compression but has HW
compression engine for hextile encoding which achives a very high
performance.
Can it be used by OpenBMC?
Should we support V4L2 regardless of our own solution?

Thanks,
Avi
On Thu, Jun 21, 2018 at 12:13 AM Eddie James <eajames@linux.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I've been working on IKVM for OpenBMC and thought I would share my
> progress for any feedback. I have a working driver for the AST2500 video
> engine, and a functional view-only vnc server that runs on the BMC. This
> can be used to view the host graphics output (though it's not very
> interesting, just a login screen since I don't have any input working
> yet). I have it running at 24 fps, using ~2.8 Mbps network (the jpegs
> are about 15KB, x24 -> 380KB/s).
>
> Here's the gerrit entry with everything:
> https://gerrit.openbmc-project.xyz/#/c/11206/
>
> Here's my linux tree with the driver, in a pretty messy state. I wasn't
> able to get the streaming interface working with video4linux2, due to
> complications with how AST2500 engine handles the buffers, but
> performance isn't bad with basic read calls. The engine stays running
> and read() just grabs the latest frame.
> https://github.com/eddiejames/linux/commit/94b4c9b76d9ec58c5cc08527ca203741f17929c9
>
> And here's the vnc server, which does require a small extension to
> libvncserver in order to transfer raw jpegs, and of course all the vnc
> code to only transfer changed blocks isn't used at all.
> https://github.com/eddiejames/obmc-ikvm
>
> Let me know if anyone has any thoughts! Will work on getting input
> working next.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Eddie
>