[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 at 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
>