Re: [RFC PATCH v5 6/9] media: tegra: Add Tegra210 Video input driver

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Hi Sakari/Laurent,

Few questions to confirm my understanding on below discussion.

1. Some sensors that you are referring as don't work with single devnode controlling pipeline devices are ISP built-in sensors where setup of pipeline and subdevices happen separately?

2. With driver supporting single device node control of entire pipeline devices compared to MC-based, limitation is with userspace apps for only these complex camera sensors?

3. Does all upstream video capture drivers eventually will be moved to support MC-based?

4. Based on libcamera doc looks like it will work with both types of MC-based and single devnode based pipeline setup drivers for normal sensors and limitation is when we use ISP built-in sensor or ISP HW block. Is my understanding correct?

Thanks

Sowjanya


On 3/31/20 11:33 AM, Sowjanya Komatineni wrote:

On 3/31/20 9:40 AM, Sowjanya Komatineni wrote:

On 3/31/20 4:52 AM, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
External email: Use caution opening links or attachments


Hello,

On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 01:27:19PM +0200, Hans Verkuil wrote:
On 3/31/20 1:10 PM, Sakari Ailus wrote:
On Tue, Mar 31, 2020 at 12:56:57PM +0200, Hans Verkuil wrote:
On 3/31/20 12:32 PM, Sakari Ailus wrote:
On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 12:59:15PM +0200, Hans Verkuil wrote:
On 3/25/20 12:03 PM, Sakari Ailus wrote:
On Mon, Mar 23, 2020 at 10:52:32AM -0700, Sowjanya Komatineni wrote:
Tegra210 contains a powerful Video Input (VI) hardware controller
which can support up to 6 MIPI CSI camera sensors.

Each Tegra CSI port can be one-to-one mapped to VI channel and can
capture from an external camera sensor connected to CSI or from
built-in test pattern generator.

Tegra210 supports built-in test pattern generator from CSI to VI.

This patch adds a V4L2 media controller and capture driver support
for Tegra210 built-in CSI to VI test pattern generator.

Signed-off-by: Sowjanya Komatineni <skomatineni@xxxxxxxxxx>
---
  drivers/staging/media/Kconfig              | 2 +
  drivers/staging/media/Makefile             | 1 +
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/Kconfig        | 10 +
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/Makefile       | 8 +
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/TODO           | 10 +
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-common.h | 263 +++++++
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-csi.c    | 522 ++++++++++++++
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-csi.h    | 118 ++++
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-vi.c     | 1058 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-vi.h     | 83 +++
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-video.c  | 129 ++++
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-video.h  | 32 +
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra210.c     | 754 ++++++++++++++++++++
  drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra210.h     | 192 +++++
Why staging? Are there reasons not to aim this to the kernel proper right away? If you only support TPG, the driver may not have too many (if any)
real users anyway.

  14 files changed, 3182 insertions(+)
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/Kconfig
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/Makefile
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/TODO
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-common.h
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-csi.c
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-csi.h
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-vi.c
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-vi.h
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-video.c
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra-video.h
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra210.c
  create mode 100644 drivers/staging/media/tegra/tegra210.h

<snip>

+static int tegra_channel_g_input(struct file *file, void *priv,
+                               unsigned int *i)
+{
+      *i = 0;
+      return 0;
+}
+
+static int tegra_channel_s_input(struct file *file, void *priv,
+                               unsigned int input)
+{
+      if (input > 0)
+              return -EINVAL;
+
+      return 0;
+}
Please see patchset on topic "v4l2-dev/ioctl: Add V4L2_CAP_IO_MC" on
linux-media; it's relevant here, too.
No, it isn't. The pipeline is controlled by the driver, not by userspace.
This is a regular video capture driver, not an ISP driver.
I don't think that really makes a difference, whether a device is an ISP or not, but instead what does is whether there is something to control in its pipeline that cannot be generally done through the regular V4L2 interface. Even plain CSI-2 receiver drivers should be media device centric these days as doing otherwise excludes using a range of sensor drivers with them, including any possible future support for e.g. sensor embedded data.

We've been back and forth on this before for this driver. I see no reason to make things complicated, these are simple video pipelines for video capture. Making this media device centric means that existing software using the BSP version of this driver require
a full rewrite, which is not desirable.

If we are going to require CSI receiver drivers to be media centric, then that's a major departure of existing practice. And something that needs to be discussed first,
I'd be happy to discuss that.

Either way, the current design is problematic as it excludes a range of camera sensors being used with the driver --- addressing of which requires converting the driver MC centric. If the driver is merged to mainline, then
the user might face a Kconfig option or a module parameter to choose
between the two --- this defines uAPI behaviour after all.

The only way to avoid that in the future is to make it MC-centric right
away.

since that will require that support for each csi receiver driver is added to libcamera. Is libcamera ready for that? Are common applications using libcamera yet?

Obviously, if NVIDIA decides that this is worth the effort, then I have no objection.
But I don't think it is something we should require at this stage.
Works for me. But in that case NVIDIA should also be aware that doing so
has consequences.

We also haven't discussed what to do with old V4L2-centric drivers which you'd use with sensors that expose their own subdevs. The proportion of all sensors might not be large currently but it is almost certainly bound to
grow in the future.

FWIW, Intel ipu3-cio2 CSI-2 receiver driver is MC-centric e.g. for the above reasons. Libcamera supports it currently. I'll let Laurent (cc'd)
comment on the details.
I think it would be good to at least describe in some detail what you gain by taking the media centric route, and what the obstacles are (loss of compatibility
with existing applications, requiring libcamera support).
In this case the main gain is control of the camera sensor. Sensors can
appear as simple when you don't look too closely at them, but many
sensors (especially the ones modelled after SMIA++ and the now standard
- and open! - MIPI CCS specification) have 3 locations to perform
cropping (analog, digital and output), and 3 locations to perform
scaling (binning, skipping, and full-featured scaler). All of these need
to be controlled by userspace one way or another if you want to
implement proper camera algorithms, which those platforms target.
Thanks Laurent/Sakari/Hans.

Based on discussion, seems like its good to change driver now to media-centric rather than later.

As Jetson is devkit and custom camera sensor module meeting spec can be used, its good to let sensor control to user space.

Will look into and update to use media-centric APIs.
Will discuss this internally and will get back on this...

My personal feeling has always been that for ISP drivers the pros of making a media-centric driver outweigh the cons, but that for a standard video capture
pipeline without complex processing blocks the cons outweigh the pros.

This might change if libcamera becomes widely used, but we're not there yet.

To be honest, I am not opposed to having a kernel config option for drivers like this that select the media-centric API vs a regular API, if that can be done without too much work. If you need full control for your embedded system, then you enable the option. If you want full compatibility with existing
applications, then disable it.
How would distributions be supposed to handle those ? That could in the
end need to be a per-driver option, and it would be very messy. Maybe
it's unavoidable, I'm trying to figure out a way to avoid such an option
for sensor drivers, to decide to expose them as a single subdev or
multiple subdevs in order to support multiple streams CSI-2 streams, and
I'm not sure I'll succeed.

--
Regards,

Laurent Pinchart




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