Re: [PATCH 5/6] mx31moboard: camera support

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Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Valentin Longchamp wrote:

Sascha Hauer wrote:
On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 06:41:13PM +0200, Valentin Longchamp wrote:
Hi Guennadi,

Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
Hi

On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Valentin Longchamp wrote:

We have two mt9t031 cameras that have a muxed bus on the robot.
We can control which one we are using with gpio outputs. This
currently is not optimal
So, what prevents you from registering two platform devices for your two
cameras? Is there a problem with that?
The lack of time until now to do it properly. I sent those patches as
initial RFC (and by the way thanks for your comment).

I would like to have one video interface only and that I can switch
between the two physical camera using a quite simple system call. Would
that be compatible with registering the two platform devices ?
Wouldn't it be better to have /dev/video[01] for two cameras? How do
keep the registers synchron between both cameras otherwise?

Well, from my experimentations, most initializations are done when you open
the device. So if you close the device, switch camera and open it again, the
registers are initialized with the need values. Of course there is a problem
is you switch camera while the device is open.

It could be ok with /dev/video[01], but I would need something that would
prevent one device to be opened when the other already is open (a mutex, but
where ?).

Besides, I have read a slide from Dongsoo Kim
(http://www.celinuxforum.org/CelfPubWiki/ELC2009Presentations?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=Framework_for_digital_camera_in_linux-in_detail.ppt
slides 41-47) and the cleanest solution would be to have the two chips
enumerated with VIDIOC_ENUMINPUT as proposed. What would then be the v4l2 call
to switch from one device to each other ? How to "link" it with the kernel
code that make the real hardware switching ?

Ok, I don't have a definite answer to this, so, just my thoughts:

1. soc-camera currently registers one struct v4l2_device device per _host_ immediately upon its registration, and one struct video_device per _client_ platform device.

Ok understood.


2. we currently have 1 or 2 boards in the mainline with two video client devices on one interface: arch/sh/boards/mach-migor/ and (unsure about) arch/sh/boards/board-ap325rxa.c. At least the first of them exports two platform devices and thus gets /dev/video[01]. Accesses are synchronised with a mutex (I don't actually like that, I'd prefer to get a -EBUSY back instead of hanging in D in open()), and a successful acquisition of the mutex switches the respective camera on. See code for details. So, this approach is supported and it works. In this case we have one v4l2_device and two video_device instances, don't know whether this matches how this is supposed to be done, but it works so far:-)

I am going to stick to this approach since it works now. This would allow me to have code that could go now into mainline.


3. to support switching inputs, significant modifications to soc_camera.c would be required. I read Nate's argument before, that as long as clients can only be accessed one at a time, this should be presented by multiple inputs rather than multiple device nodes. Somebody else from the V4L folk has also confirmed this opinion. In principle I don't feel strongly either way. But currently soc-camera uses a one i2c client to one device node model, and I'm somewhat reluctant to change this before we're done with the v4l2-subdev conversion.


Sure, one step at a time. So for now the switching is not possible with soc_camera.

My problem is that both cameras have the same I2C address since they are the same.

Would I need to declare 2 i2c_device with the same address (I'm not sure it would even work ...) used by two _client_ platform_devices or would I have to have the two platform devices pointing to the same i2c_device ?

Thanks

Val

--
Valentin Longchamp, PhD Student, EPFL-STI-LSRO1
valentin.longchamp@xxxxxxx, Phone: +41216937827
http://people.epfl.ch/valentin.longchamp
MEA3485, Station 9, CH-1015 Lausanne
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