This chapter describes the application processing unit (APU) Linux software stack. The stack and vertical domains are shown in the following figure.
Fig. 1 Linux Software Stack and Vertical Domains
The stack is horizontally divided into the following layers:
Application layer (user-space)
Jupyter notebooks with a simple control and visualization interface
GStreamer multimedia framework with python bindings for video pipeline control
Middleware layer (user-space)
Implements and exposes domain-specific functionality by means of GStreamer plugins to interface with the application layer
Provides access to kernel frameworks
Operating system (OS) layer (kernel-space)
Provides a stable, well-defined API to user-space
Includes device drivers and kernel frameworks (subsystems)
Access to hardware IPs
Vertically, the software components are divided by domain:
Video capture
Codec
Accelerator
Display
Audio
The subsequent chapters describe the components of each vertical domain first and cover application layer components next.