The War Against Deadlocks, part 2: GNonLin’s reincarnation (the other thousand Deadlocks)

• October 15, 2015
• gnome  
• pitivi  

Read the first part on Jeff’s blog: The War Against Deadlocks, part 1: The story of our new thread-safe mixing elements implementation

GNonLin has served our cause well for a number of years, but was left with indelible marks from the Old World. We grew increasingly worried with GNonLin’s common affiliation with Deadlocks, to the point where it was known as “the Baron of Deadlocks” by our battalion. We tried correcting it, tried reasoning with it, but alas—we only got “not-negotiated” caps errors.

A swift operation took place. The baron was captured and we applied a mix of heavy persuasion and alchemy, until it renounced its questionable affiliations and was reborn. The rise of the Non Linear Engine (“NLE”) plugin brought much joy in the county. Users are no longer harassed by renegade Deadlocks as they peacefully seek along their timelines. The Deadlocks may still try to haunt us, but it’s a whole New World, in which old tricks won’t affect us anymore.

In the words of the Maintainers:

We reused parts of the videomixer plugin to create the compositor plugin, which, in comparison, is thread safe. The new compositor plugin is already used by quite a few multimedia apps. In this process we created a new base class, which helped rewriting the audiomixer plugin to fix it and make it thread safe. This allowed us to switch from using adder to using audiomixer.

As you might know, the GStreamer plugins are used for creating pipelines, for example: (video1 * effect1) + video2 = x. The compositor plugin implements the + in this equation. A pipeline is used by NLE to play a video project. NleComposition translates a project’s timeline into a GStreamer pipeline dynamically, depending on the current position:

Recently we finished the replacement of GNonLin with Non Linear Engine. This means the composition uses a master thread for setting up the pipeline, whereas before the old composition used to unlink/relink new pipelines from both the streaming thread and from the seeking thread and this was causing Deadlocks (“the other thousand”). Whatsmore, we previously had to have all the elements in the entire timeline available in the composition in the PAUSED state, which meant there were many—so many!—useless threads, created and waiting like sitting ducks; whereas elements are now created only when the pipeline needs them, and they are kept in the READY state until they are actually used by the pipeline.