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Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

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Re: Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

#21

Post by le-mark »

Palomides wrote: post #4
Aurornis wrote: post #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…

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

Is there a SOC you prefer, why? Linux support seems about on par with most?

Re: Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

#22

Post by packetlost »

mcmcmc wrote: post #11
packetlost wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> all of their software is a mess and the hardware has some bugs/issues Is that not enough of a reason?

Fair!

Re: Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

#23

Post by jauntywundrkind »

XorNot wrote: post #20
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #12

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…

Wait is IPU6 working now? My work laptop has it and the only thing I know is it might work provided I use some user space relay driver and a bunch of other things. Has this situation improved?

I looked and looked and looked. I don't know why but IPU7 is reported to be pretty good. But IPU6 might still be in perpetual limbo; I don't know. What kernel are you on btw? Sorry for your pain.

Re: Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

#24

Post by frankharv »

MisterTea wrote: post #13
4fterd4rk wrote: post #8

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?

They did, jut not mainline. People forget these are embedded chips - they are intended to go inside of something and do one thing. These chips lack auto hardware discovery because the manufacturer assumes the customer will only turn on the hardware peripherals they need for their specific use case and build a static kernel image to meet that requirement. They ship a product that will likely see few, if any software u…

I agree with much of what you say. Adding a second display port was not something anybody needed.

Desktop computer was a reach. Even for BeagleBone.

I am surprised RK3566 and RK3568 still don't have good UEFI-EDK2 support.

RK3588 has great UEFI-EDK2 support. I wish somebody would backport RK356x and RK3399 boards....

The pace of development is too fast. We don't need more aarch64 CPU but better support. RISC-V adds to the mayhem.

Like we need that...

The Open Source Hardware Dream.

Re: Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

#25

Post by chucklenorris »

Aurornis wrote: post #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…

wow, i have a few of these laying around. i also bought some imx678 sensors i wanted to use with them. i tried pretty hard to make a driver work with these but it was impossible to get the isp working without modifying the kernel itself so i gave up. That convinced me to never buy hw that doesn't have drivers in the mainline kernel.

Re: Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

#27

Post by MisterTea »

frankharv wrote: post #24
MisterTea wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did, jut not mainline. People forget these are embedded chips - they are intended to go inside of something and do one thing. These chips lack auto hardware discovery because the manufacturer assumes the customer will only turn on the hardware peripherals they need for their specific use case and build a static kernel image to meet that requirement. They ship a product that will likely see few, if any software u…

I agree with much of what you say. Adding a second display port was not something anybody needed. Desktop computer was a reach. Even for BeagleBone. I am surprised RK3566 and RK3568 still don't have good UEFI-EDK2 support. RK3588 has great UEFI-EDK2 support. I wish somebody would backport RK356x and RK3399 boards.... The pace of development is too fast. We don't need more aarch64 CPU but better support. RISC-V adds t…

RISC-V added the same problem to the mix Arm did: no standard platform to define what a system is, how hardware is detected, reported, and configured, or how to boot. Then again, RISC-V is just an open instruction set but they should have tried to assemble a forum and define a reference platform.

Re: Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

#29

Post by mschuster91 »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #10
Aurornis wrote: post #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.

> If they had started by working with upstream

LOL. It simply doesn't work that way.

It's all about time to market. A BSP with a custom fork of the Linux kernel that barely works can be done concurrent with hardware development.

But if you say as a manufacturer, we'll first get it upstream-supported by Linux and then release the hardware... by the time the quality is good enough for the proper upstream Linux kernel, the hardware is multiple generations outdated.

And often enough, the software side is an afterthought. The BSP teams get thrown the hardware and told to "make it work", which all too often means having to do horrible hacks to the Linux kernel that would be completely unacceptable upstream. Even if they'd hire Greg KH himself, the fundamental problem remains that the BSP teams aren't asked if the HW designers can make the life of the BSP team easier.

The one notable exception to this unholy mess, however, is Apple. And that is why Apple hardware seamlessly integrates within the ecosystem, why it is so performant and why it is so energy efficient.

Re: Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

#30

Post by ironman1478 »

skoocda wrote: post #17
ironman1478 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are there any resources you would recommend for learning about real implementations?

Unfortunately no. It's all proprietary and locked up. However, I can say that the optimizations are not always about IQ (though that is a major factor). It's also about making things run fast enough in a low latency environment. Those two requirements lead to strange hardware designs that lead to strange register interfaces.
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