I'm wanting to take photos from 2 different cameras at exactly the same time (or as close as possible).
If I use multithreading or multiprocessing, it still runs the threads/processes consecutively.. For instance if I start the following processes:
Take_photo_1.start()
Take_photo_2.start()
While those processes would run in parallel, the commands to start the processes are still executed sequentially. Is there any way to execute both those processes at exactly the same time?
There's no way to make this exact even if you're writing directly in machine code. Even if you have all the threads wait on a kernel barrier, that wait can take different times on different cores, and there are opcodes to process between the barrier wait and the camera get that have to get fetched and run on a system where the caches may be in different states, and there's nothing stopping the OS from stealing the CPU from one of the threads to run some completely unrelated code, and the I/O to the camera (even if it isn't serialized, which it may be) probably isn't a guaranteed static time, and so on.
When you throw an interpreted language on top of it (especially one with a GIL, like Python, which means the bytecodes between the barrier wait and the camera get can't be run in parallel)… well, you're not really changing anything; "impossible * 7" is still "impossible". But you are making it even more obvious.
Fortunately, very few real-life problems have a true hard real-time requirement like that. Instead, you have a requirement like "99.9% of the time, all camera gets should happen within +/-4ms of the desired exact 30fps". Or, maybe, "90% of the time it's within +/-1ms, 99.9% of the time it's within +/-4ms, 99.999% of the time it's within +/-20ms, as long as you don't do anything stupid like change the wall-power state of the laptop while running the code".
Or… well, only you know why you wanted "exact", and can figure out what the actual requirements are that would satisfy you.
And for that case, often the simplest thing to do is write the code the obvious way, stress test the hell out of it, see if it meets your requirements, and figure out how to optimize things only if it doesn't.
So, your existing code may well be fine.
If not, adding a shared barrier = threading.Barrier()
and doing a barrier.wait()
right before the camera.get()
may be all you need.
You may need to add logic to detect timer lag and re-synchronize (which you might do independently in each thread, or have whichever thread gets there first compute it and just make everyone else wait at the barrier).
You may need to rewrite the core loop in C. Or dump whichever OS you're using for one with better real-time guarantees like QNX. Or throw out the OS entirely so there's no scheduler to get in the way. Or throw out the complex superscalar CPUs and implement the whole thing as a hardware state machine. Or…
But, assuming you have reasonable requirements in the first place, you usually don't have to go very far.
この記事はインターネットから収集されたものであり、転載の際にはソースを示してください。
侵害の場合は、連絡してください[email protected]
コメントを追加