Table of Contents
Memory allocation and management is a very important topic in multimedia. High definition video uses many megabytes to store one single frame of video. It is important to reuse the memory when possible instead of constantly allocating and freeing the memory.
Multimedia systems usually use special purpose chips, such as DSPs or GPUs to perform the heavy lifting (especially for video). These special purpose chips have usually strict requirements for the memory that they can operate on and how the memory is accessed.
This chapter talks about the memory management features that
GStreamer plugins can use. We will first talk about the
lowlevel GstMemory
object that manages
access to a piece of memory. We then continue with
GstBuffer
that is used to exchange data
between plugins (and the application) and that uses
GstMemory
. We talk about
GstMeta
that can be placed on buffers to
give extra info about the buffer and its memory.
For efficiently managing buffers of the same size, we take a
look at GstBufferPool
. To conclude this
chapter we take a look at the GST_QUERY_ALLOCATION query that
is used to negotiate memory management options between elements.
GstMemory
is an object that manages a region
of memory. The memory object points to a region of memory of
“maxsize”. The area in this memory starting at
“offset” and for “size” bytes is the
accessible region in the memory. the maxsize of the memory can
never be changed after the object is created, however, the offset
and size can be changed.
GstMemory
objects are created by a
GstAllocator
object. Most allocators implement the
default gst_allocator_alloc()
method but some allocator
might implement a different method, for example when additional parameters
are needed to allocate the specific memory.
Different allocators exist for, for example, system memory, shared memory and memory backed by a DMAbuf file descriptor. To implement support for a new kind of memory type, you must implement a new allocator object as shown below.
Data access to the memory wrapped by the GstMemory
object is always protected with a gst_memory_map()
and gst_memory_unmap()
pair. An access mode
(read/write) must be given when mapping memory. The map
function returns a pointer to the valid memory region that can
then be accessed according to the requested access mode.
Below is an example of making a GstMemory
object and using the gst_memory_map()
to
access the memory region.
[...] GstMemory *mem; GstMapInfo info; gint i; /* allocate 100 bytes */ mem = gst_allocator_alloc (NULL, 100, NULL); /* get access to the memory in write mode */ gst_memory_map (mem, &info, GST_MAP_WRITE); /* fill with pattern */ for (i = 0; i < info.size; i++) info.data[i] = i; /* release memory */ gst_memory_unmap (mem, &info); [...]