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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really feel like that should be table stakes if your entire business is making chips to run Linux, though after working professionally with their stuff I'm really not a fan of Rockchip
Why is that? IME pretty much all of their software is a mess and the hardware has some bugs/issues iirc but is otherwise ok?
Is that not enough of a reason?
Intel's IPU6 has been a ~4 year travail to get going (thankfully IPU7 landed fairly quickly however!) https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IPU6-Camera-Challenge-25 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IPU7-Linux-6.17
AMD similarly has only just gotten the Strix Halo ISP near working: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ISP4-For-Linux-7.2
The whole video world seems like a nightmare. Difficult world of hardware. Just the worst Intellectual Property hostage taking banditry from awful awful valent legally predatory people everywhere, a dark forest ready to leap out of the dark and attack you if you dare use a computing to deal in bits that represent moving images.
I guess I don't understand... why would the SOC manufacturer spend the money on integrating this stuff if they don't intend on also spending the money to enable it on the software side?
It's because of the Raspberry Pi foundation we have this perception that embedded Arm chips are like general purpose desktop computers that run Linux desktops. The original Pi SoC was designed for TV set top boxes, STB's hence the loopy booting from GPU which was likely part of some obfuscated secure boot chain to thwart STB hackers. The Pi was a throw away hobby toy based on a chip Broadcom was going to scrap so they got a dumpster deal. It took a lot of effort for the community to fully reverse the Broadcom SoC and bring all the Pi hardware to mainline.
I hope that the more SoCs get mainline V4L2, the more likely the future SoCs are going to be to use it instead of doing something non-standard and awful.
I guess I don't understand... why would the SOC manufacturer spend the money on integrating this stuff if they don't intend on also spending the money to enable it on the software side?
Worth noting that, well, alas, camera support is incredibly incredibly incredibly cursed, period. It feels like, broadly, with all the image blocks, everyone makes really neat really good hardware thats chock-a-block full of capabilities that are un- or poorly documented or really hard to support for reasons, etc. Its a pretty bespoke high throughput pipeline with a lot of special domain knowledge very unlike anythin…
Worth noting that, well, alas, camera support is incredibly incredibly incredibly cursed, period. It feels like, broadly, with all the image blocks, everyone makes really neat really good hardware thats chock-a-block full of capabilities that are un- or poorly documented or really hard to support for reasons, etc. Its a pretty bespoke high throughput pipeline with a lot of special domain knowledge very unlike anythin…
I work in this field and this is 100 percent true. It's really hard to learn about too. A lot of textbooks go over the algorithms in the chips in an idealized form. The actual versions are so messy and different that the textbooks aren't even useful sometimes, especially if you work on custom ISPs. It's cursed, but it's fun.
Great to see progress on mainlining more support for common and powerful chips. The work required to get this one piece into mainline over 5-6 years reveals why most chip vendors aren’t aiming for mainline by default: > A few iterations of the rkcif driver later, the basic driver providing support for the PX30 VIP and the RK3568 VICAP was accepted (October 2025). After more than five years of development, including 2…
Great to see progress on mainlining more support for common and powerful chips. The work required to get this one piece into mainline over 5-6 years reveals why most chip vendors aren’t aiming for mainline by default: > A few iterations of the rkcif driver later, the basic driver providing support for the PX30 VIP and the RK3568 VICAP was accepted (October 2025). After more than five years of development, including 2…
> why most chip vendors aren’t aiming for mainline by default: > It’s never as simple as submitting existing work upstream and making a few changes. If they had started by working with upstream, then they wouldn't have to go through unnecessary revisions trying to adapt the thing they already wrote.
They were experienced with working with upstream and it still took them that long to do it.
Worth noting that, well, alas, camera support is incredibly incredibly incredibly cursed, period. It feels like, broadly, with all the image blocks, everyone makes really neat really good hardware thats chock-a-block full of capabilities that are un- or poorly documented or really hard to support for reasons, etc. Its a pretty bespoke high throughput pipeline with a lot of special domain knowledge very unlike anythin…
Has this situation improved?