Among the earliest of pull requests this week ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window expected to begin tomorrow were the media subsystem updates. In addition to continuing to improve the common “uvcvideo” web camera driver and other routine refinements, there is also some new media hardware support slated to be included as part of the Linux 6.15 kernel.
Mauro Carvalho Chehab sent out the media subsystem updates already. Barring any issues being raised by Linus Torvalds, the media pull has some new hardware support, including new camera sensor patches and seemingly never-ending work on the uvcvideo web camera driver.
Among the new support for Linux 6.15 on the media side is adding the Aver Media H789-C PCI Express tuner card. Analog video inputs using the H789-C should now be working.
Some additions to the cx23885 media driver were needed to get analog tuning working on the AVerMedia H789-C card along with both composite and S-Video inputs and stereo audio inputs.
The media subsystem updates also include support for the Synopsys DesignWare HDMI RX controller for receiving HDMI input. The Synopsys DesignWare HDMI RX is used by the Rockchip RK3588 SoC and other hardware. With the Synopsys DesignWare HDMI RX there is support for HDMI 1.4b and HDMI 2.0 input up to 4K@60, HDMI CEC support, a variety of pixel formats, and more.
This pull request also adds support for the Qualcomm SDM670 camera subsystem that is used by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 670.
Also quite significant with this media pull request is introducing the Qualcomm Iris video decoder driver. This Iris video decode driver supports the Qualcomm video acceleration hardware to offload from the application processor. Initially supported is H.264 decoding. This Qualcomm Iris driver will eventually replace the Venus hardware. The PR explains around this Iris video decode driver:
“Introduce support for Qualcomm new video acceleration hardware i.e. iris, used for video stream decoding.
Iris is a multi pipe based hardware that offloads video stream decoding from the application processor (AP). It supports H.264 decoding. The AP communicates with hardware through a well defined protocol, called as host firmware interface (HFI), which provides fine-grained and asynchronous control over individual hardware features.
The existing venus driver supports only hfi gen1 to communicate with the firmware while this iris driver supports both hfi gen1 and hfi gen2. The support of hfi gen1 is added to the iris driver with the intention that it can support old gen1 interface based firmware, while enabling gen2 based future SOCs. With this, the plan is to migrate older SOCs from venus to iris. As of now, since the iris driver supports only entry level features and doesn’t have feature parity with the venus driver, it is enabled for SM8250 only when venus driver is disabled. When the feature parity is achieved, the plan is to enable the iris driver unconditionally for SM8250, and then gradually start removing platforms from venus driver.
Hardware supported by only venus – 8916, 8996, SDM660, SDM845, SC7180, SC7280
Hardware supported by only iris – SM8550
Hardware supported by both venus and iris – SM8250This driver comes with below capabilities:
– V4L2 compliant video driver with M2M and STREAMING capability.
– Supports H264 decoder.”
It’s quite an exciting media pull request for the Linux 6.15 kernel with these new hardware support additions.
