The big picture isn't that gloomy

Posted Oct 3, 2024 13:56 UTC (Thu) by laurent.pinchart (subscriber, #71290)
Parent article: Coping with complex cameras

> Support for complex camera devices in Linux seems likely to be messy and proprietary for some time but, with luck, it will slowly improve.

I'd like to bring a bit of a more positive spin to this conclusion. The Linux kernel and libcamera already have fully open-source support for multiple ISPs, most notably the Raspberry Pi 4 ISP, the VSI ISP8000 (a.k.a. rkisp1 for historical reasons) found in SoCs from Rockchip, NXP and other vendors, and the Intel IPU3 ISP (found in Sky Lake and Kaby Lake SoCs). Support for the Raspberry Pi 5 ISP and the Arm Mali C55 ISP is developed in the open and close to getting merged upstream in both the kernel and libcamera. The list is constantly growing.

This being said, it's not all rainbows and unicorns either, support for some important platforms is missing today.

to post comments

The big picture isn't that gloomy

Posted Oct 3, 2024 20:07 UTC (Thu) by ribalda (subscriber, #58945) [Link]

I also want to thank Laurent for all his work co-organizing this MicroConfonference.

In the last years, Laurent has done an amazing job with vendors such as Raspberry PI or the Arm Mali. They are the golden standard for what an open camera stack should look like.

But that work is difficult to map into the hardware that runs *most* of the consumer electronics today. We do not support the cameras in most (maybe all) of the phones and the only way to use the current intel hardware is to software emulate the ISP, with limited capabilities and very poor performance.

The vendors that want to collaborate with us say that *for ISPs* they do not need any of the abstractions provided by V4L2 (formats, controls, media controller) and that the current V4L2 openness model is not compatible with their business model. The very same vendors are delivering open graphic stacks... so it is not fair to say that the lack of support is all their fault.

There are some positive points from the MC:
- It is the first time that 4 vendors attended an open conference.
- We are talking about relaxing the openness requirements of v4l2 in favor of our users
- We have started to look into what other subsystems are doing in terms of building an ecosystem

If we manage to include the vendors into our community, support for new ISPs will keep flowing (instead of being heroic achievements), and users will soon enjoy their cameras in their open OSs.

IPU4 and IPU6 support?

Posted Oct 8, 2024 3:07 UTC (Tue) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link] (1 responses)

Will IPU4 and the PSYS part of IPU6 be supported? That's what I'm most interested in today, as it would allow shipping high quality cameras on Linux laptops.

IPU4 and IPU6 support?

Posted Oct 8, 2024 14:38 UTC (Tue) by laurent.pinchart (subscriber, #71290) [Link]

Those are questions for Intel. My understanding is they have no plan to provide IPU4 support. For the IPU6 PSYS, there's a global consensus that we all want it to be supported upstream, but no agreement yet on how to get there.

Tuning for image quality?

Posted Oct 8, 2024 16:22 UTC (Tue) by DemiMarie (subscriber, #164188) [Link] (1 responses)

Are there any plans to perform the per-device tuning needed for optimal image quality, or will the image quality always be worse than with the OEM OS?

Tuning for image quality?

Posted Oct 8, 2024 18:35 UTC (Tue) by laurent.pinchart (subscriber, #71290) [Link]

libcamera has a tuning tool. It hasn't reached feature and quality parity with closed-source implementations yet, but we're actively working on improving it. The image quality doesn't depend only on tuning, but also on the implementation of the ISP control algorithms. This is also an area that we are actively working on.