Re: [Discuss-gnuradio] [coproc] Domain concept for blocks and ports

[Sylvain Munaut]

Hi

> In this design, a block indicates to GNU Radio that it needs to allocate
> the memory for either its input buffer (actually, the upstream block's
> output buffer) or its own output buffer, by adding a flags field to the
> io_signature and having one of the possible flags be WE_OWN.

Well, what I was thinking about is a bit different.

The block didn't really did that itself. It was delegated to a "domain" object.

The advantages are :
 - No special casing or flags. The "normal" host buffers as they are
now can be handled in the same way.
 - Since the block doesn't do that itself, that means that several
blocks can use the same "domain" object and then, if two blocks are
back to back, that object would know how to handle that.
   If the block does it all itself, two blocks using a GPU for
examples couldn't really realize that they're both in the GPU and that
there is no need to copy data back to the host at all between them. By
delegating those to standardized domain plugins, it would allow to
handle those case more gracefully IMHO.

Of course this is a bit further from the current architecture but I
think the external visible API wouldn't have to change that much when
implementing this scheme either.


Cheers,

  Sylvain