On 4/19/22 14:01, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 12:28:06PM -0700, Guenter Roeck wrote:
On 4/19/22 11:24, Nicolas Dufresne wrote:
Hi,
adding linux-hwmon in CC for a wider feedback.
Le vendredi 15 avril 2022 à 13:18 +0200, Benjamin Mugnier a écrit :
Add V4L2_CID_TEMPERATURE control to get temperature from sensor in
celsius as a volatile and read-only control, and its documentation.
Useful to monitor thermals from v4l controls for sensors that support
this.
Any justification to expose a temperature sensor outside of the dedicated kernel
API hwmon ? I know if may makes it harder to use, as the sensor isn't bound to
the camera driver, and also the sensor may not work if the camera is not
streaming. But in the end, the API in hwmon does not look that complex, and is
perhaps more precise ?
All in all, I think we need a strong justification to implement a custom
thermometer interface, something described here and documented with care to
prevent abuse. I would also see opinion from folks outside of the linux-media,
hence why I have CCed hwmon mailing list.
All I can say is that this seems to be odd and a bit outside the scope of
v4l2. I would have expected the vgxy61 driver to register a hwmon device
instead.
I don't have a definitive opinion yet, but as Nicolas raised the issue
by pushing towards hwmon, I'll offer counter-arguments for the sake of
it :-)
The temperature sensor in the imaging sensor is used to measure the die
temperature, in order to tune the noise and spectral response model of
the imaging sensor. It's thus not a generic-purpose temperature sensor.
If the feature were to be exposed through hwmon, userspace would need to
associate an hwmon device to the imaging sensor V4L2 subdev (we have a
way to do so through the MC API, it doesn't support hwmon at this point,
but I suppose it could be added). There are also various constraints
that tie the temperature reading to the imaging side, it could be that
the temperature would only be readable while capturing frames. That's
probably possible to handle too but returning an error from the
temperature read.
Code-wise, both the driver and userspace would be more complex, for very
little practical gain (I don't dispute a theorical gain).
All I can say is - not my subsystem, not my call to make. If you say this
is special and is better handled in V4L2, I'll take you by your word.
Guenter
