Standard version: 1.5

Major Change

Sony Creative Software would like to be on the working group to define this extension. We have been working with Digital Film Tools on drafting this extension and creating a prototype implementation for host and plug-in, for both CPU memory obtained via the Memory suite, as well as OpenCL resources.

There is a need for a suite that allows a plug-in to cache internal data during render calls for retrieval in a subsequent render call, e.g. retimer caching motion vectors. This is especially important if we split off separate render object from the persistent instance.

A new Caching Suite should be created, that allows plugins to use host side data caching. Basically a giant key/value pair store. At the bare minimum it needs to cache binary data blocks, and ideally structured data (somewhat harder). The data should be signed with a fixed sized key, not a string.

After a plugin has placed data into a cache and has “let go of it”, the data is not guaranteed to be there, the data may have been ejected from the cache by a later write. 

Note that this is for caching of reproducible data, not for storing of any values that require persistence.