Hi Stefan, Hans,
On 02.02.23 00:12, Stefan Herdler wrote:
Hi Hans, Sören,
On 01/02/23, 10:15 Hans Verkuil wrote:
[...]
Once it is converted to vb2 the driver can stay.
Note that the driver might need a bit more work: we use the
v4l2-compliance
utility to test V4L2 API compliance of a driver, and after the vb2
conversion the driver should pass this test. So the compliance test
might
find some other things that do not work as they should, and it would be
really good to clean that up as well. Usually the things it finds are
pretty
easy to fix.
For the records, as long I remember it:
The "Buget Patch" driver is superfluous and can be removed.
This driver is for an experimental hardware-mod which never really
worked. No such hardware was ever produced.
I was really surprised to see it.
I own such card, as I wrote earlier. The budget patch works great and is
necessary for such cards. Please keep it.
Regards,
Soeren
There is a long lasting controversy about the deprecated 3
DVB-API-files
for the av7110 driver.
Sören stated he is tired about that discussions and looking for
permanent solution without having to rewrite the whole driver.
In this case I'm just the messenger, but I would also prefer a
permanent
solution.
That is why I made the suggestion with the driver specific UAPI file.
The av7110 driver is only driver using this API-part.
And the modification is fairly easy and the impact minimal.
May that be a compromise all parties can live with?
Moving it to a public av7110.h header makes sense to me.
I've done this already.
Primary for my self to see if and how it may work.
I'll attach the patch, maybe it is helpful.
Theoretically there shouldn't be a difference whether the headers are in
1 or 3 files.
Unused symbols should be removed by the compiler while optimization the
result should be identical.
I was just curious and decided to try it.
Unfortunately I couldn't test it yet. But hopefully next weekend.
There seems to be an issue with new kernel and my Nvidia graphics-card.
But the kernel builds and boots into text console.
It's a nice-to-have in my view, and moving it to a driver-specific API
should avoid future discussions. The fact remains that as long as
people use this API we can't remove it, however much we would want to.
I think the main problem has always been that we are surprised at how
many people still use these cards. It's very similar in that respect
to the bttv driver: very old, but still in use.
I own one too.
Such cards can still be handy for digitizing family videos and stuff.
The difference appears to be that the use of saa7146 cards is confined
to a specific region (esp. Germany), whereas bttv is in use worldwide.
Until recently I wasn't aware that there are no saa7146 cards for ATSC
nor ISDB.
Because of that we just miss that it is still in use.
Having an active maintainer should help with that.
Regards,
Hans
On 01/02/23, 14:51 Hans Verkuil wrote:
[...]
It's the analog video streaming that uses vb2, so being able to test
that
is critical.
The DVB data always uses one specific of the 2 video ports. The other
one is not able to handle DVB-data.
It is always the path through BRS and FIFO3, if I remember correctly.
The analog video data has to use the remaining video port and FIFO1 if a
DVB-Tuner is present.
Input data format is YUV and output RGB. At least at the FF cards.
(I may have confused the Ports, but in general it should be correct.)
I don't have a combined budget-card and don't know how the driver
handles analog inputs. But because of this hardware limitation there
shouldn't be much difference between the decoded video of the FF and the
video-input of a combined DVB-budget.
Maybe testing on a FF is sufficient?
So I decided to do this differently:
1) I'll revert the move of saa7146 to staging, it will go back to
mainline. av7110 stays in staging for now (that might change, I
just don't want to make more changes than strictly necessary).
2) I will do the vb2 conversion. I have the analog video hardware,
so I can test this.
I didn't want to spend time on that originally, but since these drivers
are still in use, it is probably best if I bite the bullet and just
do it.
I'm now almost done with the vb2 conversion of cx18, and it was about
2 days work, which isn't that bad. I'll try to get this saa7146 vb2
conversion done this month.
The PR reverting this has just been posted:
https://patchwork.linuxtv.org/project/linux-media/patch/5902a4f2-da31-816c-f3cf-020340dbaddf@xxxxxxxxx/
Great news, thanks!
Regards
Stefan
Regards,
Hans
