Worth noting that, well, alas, camera support is incredibly incredibly incredibly cursed, period. It feels like, broadly, with all the image blocks, everyone makes really neat really good hardware thats chock-a-block full of capabilities that are un- or poorly documented or really hard to support for reasons, etc. Its a pretty bespoke high throughput pipeline with a lot of special domain knowledge very unlike anything else on computing.
The whole video world seems like a nightmare. Difficult world of hardware. Just the worst Intellectual Property hostage taking banditry from awful awful valent legally predatory people everywhere, a dark forest ready to leap out of the dark and attack you if you dare use a computing to deal in bits that represent moving images.
I work in this field and this is 100 percent true. It's really hard to learn about too. A lot of textbooks go over the algorithms in the chips in an idealized form. The actual versions are so messy and different that the textbooks aren't even useful sometimes, especially if you work on custom ISPs. It's cursed, but it's fun.
Unfortunately no. It's all proprietary and locked up. However, I can say that the optimizations are not always about IQ (though that is a major factor). It's also about making things run fast enough in a low latency environment. Those two requirements lead to strange hardware designs that lead to strange register interfaces.
Wait is IPU6 working now? My work laptop has it and the only thing I know is it might work provided I use some user space relay driver and a bunch of other things.
I looked and looked and looked. I don't know why but IPU7 is reported to be pretty good. But IPU6 might still be in perpetual limbo; I don't know. What kernel are you on btw? Sorry for your pain.
Great to see progress on mainlining more support for common and powerful chips.
The work required to get this one piece into mainline over 5-6 years reveals why most chip vendors aren’t aiming for mainline by default:
> A few iterations of the rkcif driver later, the basic driver providing support for the PX30 VIP and the RK3568 VICAP was accepted (October 2025). After more than five years of development, including 25 iterations and three renamings, this was a major milestone. On the other hand, there was still a lot to do, of course. For instance, the Rockchip MIPI CSI-2 receiver unit that is coupled closely to the VICAP required a mainline driver as well.
It’s never as simple as submitting existing work upstream and making a few changes. It takes a lot of development and a willingness to rewrite everything, possibly multiple times, to track the goals of upstream.
> why most chip vendors aren’t aiming for mainline by default:
> It’s never as simple as submitting existing work upstream and making a few changes.
If they had started by working with upstream, then they wouldn't have to go through unnecessary revisions trying to adapt the thing they already wrote.
wow, i have a few of these laying around. i also bought some imx678 sensors i wanted to use with them. i tried pretty hard to make a driver work with these but it was impossible to get the isp working without modifying the kernel itself so i gave up. That convinced me to never buy hw that doesn't have drivers in the mainline kernel.
The product has a typical lifespan of 3–5 years, they just don't need LTS.
RKISP(ImageSignalProcessor) is piece of code glued to the kernel, fast and cheap. The mainstream version provides proper integration with Linux multimedia subsystems.
I guess I don't understand... why would the SOC manufacturer spend the money on integrating this stuff if they don't intend on also spending the money to enable it on the software side?
Good. Video capture on second grade Linux SoCs is hell - lots of blobs and weird custom vendor SDKs that work with the vendor's own happy path use case demos and nothing else.
I hope that the more SoCs get mainline V4L2, the more likely the future SoCs are going to be to use it instead of doing something non-standard and awful.
28 comments
Intel's IPU6 has been a ~4 year travail to get going (thankfully IPU7 landed fairly quickly however!) https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IPU6-Camera-Challenge-25 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IPU7-Linux-6.17
AMD similarly has only just gotten the Strix Halo ISP near working: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ISP4-For-Linux-7.2
The whole video world seems like a nightmare. Difficult world of hardware. Just the worst Intellectual Property hostage taking banditry from awful awful valent legally predatory people everywhere, a dark forest ready to leap out of the dark and attack you if you dare use a computing to deal in bits that represent moving images.
Has this situation improved?
The work required to get this one piece into mainline over 5-6 years reveals why most chip vendors aren’t aiming for mainline by default:
> A few iterations of the rkcif driver later, the basic driver providing support for the PX30 VIP and the RK3568 VICAP was accepted (October 2025). After more than five years of development, including 25 iterations and three renamings, this was a major milestone. On the other hand, there was still a lot to do, of course. For instance, the Rockchip MIPI CSI-2 receiver unit that is coupled closely to the VICAP required a mainline driver as well.
It’s never as simple as submitting existing work upstream and making a few changes. It takes a lot of development and a willingness to rewrite everything, possibly multiple times, to track the goals of upstream.
after working professionally with their stuff I'm really not a fan of Rockchip
> why most chip vendors aren’t aiming for mainline by default:
> It’s never as simple as submitting existing work upstream and making a few changes.
If they had started by working with upstream, then they wouldn't have to go through unnecessary revisions trying to adapt the thing they already wrote.
So it might be too late as 3688 will be too hot...
Just like routers get dd-wrt when sold out!
>RK3588 ISP, as the vendor kernel driver is not upstreamable for various reasons
Its always IP. Afair even Raspberry Pi didnt open ISP, and support for MIPI took yeaaaaars.
I hope that the more SoCs get mainline V4L2, the more likely the future SoCs are going to be to use it instead of doing something non-standard and awful.