HW Decompression and Creating an XIL Device

When performing hardware based decompression, the SunVideo Plus acts like an XIL compute device in that it is accelerating an XIL molecule. For applications that use decompression only, it is not necessary to create an xil device and device image as described in "Creating a Sample MMACo1k Device Image". The exception to this is when an application wants to set a device specific attribute that affects decompression. There is no method in XIL of setting certain types of attribute on a compute device like the SunVideo Plus, short of opening the device explicitly and then setting the attribute. Thus, to use such attributes, you must create an xil device and image. See "XIL Source Examples" for more information.

If a device and device image are not created directly by an application, the hardware-based SunVideo Plus XIL decompression molecules will do this implicitly. However, the molecules do not currently hunt for a available hardware device to use as an accelerator. They currently attempt to use the first device in a system (/dev/o1k0). Thus, if multiple SunVideo Plus cards are installed in your system, the only current way to use each as a hardware-accelerated decompression device is to explicitly create a device and device image in an application and use a different device name for each device creation. See "XIL Source Examples" for more information.