Changes between Version 1 and Version 2 of docs_architecture

Timestamp:

Feb 19, 2011, 9:44:09 PM (14 years ago)

Author:

Matthias Vogelgesang

Comment:

--

docs_architecture

@@ -54 +54 @@
 
 An ubiquitous scheduler sets up the threading system and connected hardware accelerators like GPUs. As this is the only instance that knows where Filters can run, it should decide if a Filter should run on the GPU by inspecting the chain of computation. Furthermore, if a Filter does not need to work on a whole buffer (that means data is separable), the scheduler might also split the Filter by creating two or more instances and provide them with split data.
+
+
+=== Plugins ===
+
+A plugin is a shared object with well-defined entry functions and a set of filter functions. A plugin must provide
+
+* `plugin_init(void)` initializing the plugin if needed,
+* `plugin_destroy(void)` freeing any structures created by the plugin,
+* `plugin_get_filter_names(void)` returning an array of filter names that are provided by the plugins and are also the corresponding function names to call,
+* `plugin_get_filter_description(char *filter_name)` returning a human-readable description of the purpose of filter `filter_name` and
+* `filter_foo(char *data, int32_t width, int32_t height, int32_t bytes_per_pixel)` to call the filter.
+
+On the UFO side a plugin is loaded by creating an UfoPlugin object and passing the name of the .so file. An UfoPlugin is a relatively thin wrapper that just calls `dlopen()` (or the respective equivalent on other operating systems) to load the shared object and returns UfoFilters by reading the function pointers according to the filter name.