AMD Advanced Media Acceleration (AMA) Release Notes

Note

Version: 1.0


Overview

This section describes various requirements, limitations, known issues and their respective workarounds that are applicable to AMD AMA Video SDK.

Release Requirements

  1. The following firmware versions are required:

    1. Satelite Control (SC): 9.7.10

    2. ZSP: 1.0.5

  2. This documentation is applicable to 1.0 release.

Features in This Release

  1. Support for video transcode using either our supplied FFmpeg (n5.1.2), Gstreamer (v1.22), or custom Xilinx Media Acceleration (XMA) applications.

  2. Support for up to 4 x 4Kp60 8-bit or 10-bit video decode AV1, AVC or HEVC per device.

  3. Support for up to 2 x 4Kp60 8-bit or 10-bit video transcode of AVC or HEVC per device.

  4. Support for up to 4 x 4Kp60 8-bit or 10-bit video transcode of AV1 per device.

  5. Support for integration with software-based video image filters using our hardware DMA support to/from device memory (FFmpeg or Gstreamer).

  6. Optional use of our supplied resource management daemon (xrmd) for automated accelerator selection and load balancing.

  7. Resource utilization reporting when using our supplied resource management daemon (xrmd).

  8. Utility applications enabling collection of power, voltage, temperature and memory for each device as well as aggregate values for the MA35D accelerator card.

  9. Support for virtualization using either Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04 in KVM mode with a guest OS also running either Ubuntu 20.04 or 22.04.

Supported Kernels and Distributions

This release of AMD AMA Video SDK supports Ubuntu 22.04 and 20.04, with generic kernel 5.15.0.

Known Limitations

  1. Support for 2D graphics engine and ML engine not supported in kernel driver.

  2. This software has been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04 with generic kernel version 5.15.0.

  3. PF and VF must support PCIe memory regions BAR0 of 8 MB, BAR2 of 64 MB and BAR4 of 512 MB sizes.

  4. Host servers must enable Above 4G Decoding.

  5. A device that has been assigned to a VM cannot share its resources with its host.

  6. Only a single VF may be assigned to a VM.

  7. PCI passthrough of a physical function to a VM is not supported in this release. Utilize the included support for virtual functions (VF) when configuring a VM to access a device.

  8. For maximum server scalability, ensure that a single VF is assigned to a VM.

  9. MA35D only supports progressive content, i.e., interlaced contents are not supported in either the decoder or encoder.

  10. For encoding, only resolutions that are divisible by 4 are supported, i.e., both height and width.

  11. For decoding, only resolutions that are divisible by 2 are supported, i.e., both height and width.

  12. This version of the SDK does not support splitting a video acceleration use case across multiple MA35D devices.

  13. With the current version of FFmpeg, n5.1.2, it is not recommended to transport AV1 over MPEG TS.

  14. XMA sample applications are not meant to be run at maximum density.

  15. Encode rates up to maximum of 400 Mbps are supported.

  16. VBR and CVBR rate control modes are not supported under ULL.

  17. AV1 decoder does not support 8k resolution in portrait mode.

Known Issues

  1. A secondary bus reset (SBR) will cause the server to hang. A cold boot of the server will restore function. After installation of our driver package, our setup.sh script should be run prior to utilizing any of the features of the SDK. The setup.sh will disable secondary bus reset.

  2. AV1 decoding is not supported in the reference XMA transcoder application (ma35_transcoder_app).

  3. AV1 decoding using the included ama_av1dec Gstreamer plugin requires the use of an IVF packaged AV1 raw video stream and a corresponding ivfparse plugin to be utilized to demux the AV1 video stream.

  4. If the kernel driver is not loaded, tools such as mautil may crash when invoked.

  5. mamgmt reset should not be issued, while devices are in use.

  6. Rate control modes VBR and CVBR produce subpar VQ, with AV1 Type 1 encoders, on contents that include more than couple of seconds of high spatial and temporal complexities.

Upgrading from Previous Versions

  1. Remove any ma35 and amd-ama packages as per installation instructions.

  2. Remove any manually created Boost library soft links that may have been created, previously.

  3. Remove all entries from /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xilinx.list if this file exists.