Re: [RFC] Move some soc-camera drivers to staging in preparation for removal

[Hans Verkuil <hverkuil@xs4all.nl>]

On 02/23/2016 08:06 AM, Wu, Songjun wrote:
> 
> 
> On 2/23/2016 00:08, Ludovic Desroches wrote:
>> On Mon, Feb 22, 2016 at 04:23:54PM +0200, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>>> Hi Guennadi,
>>>
>>> (CC'ing Ludovic Desroches)
>>>
>>> On Monday 22 February 2016 14:39:08 Guennadi Liakhovetski wrote:
>>>> Hi Laurent,
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, 22 Feb 2016, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
>>>>
>>>> [snip]
>>>>
>>>>> As far as I know Renesas (or at least the kernel upstream team) doesn't
>>>>> care. The driver is only used on five SH boards, I'd also say it can be
>>>>> removed.
>>>> [snip]
>>>>
>>>>>>>> - atmel-isi: ATMEL Image Sensor Interface (ISI)
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>>    I believe this is still actively maintained. Would someone be
>>>>>>>>    willing to convert this? It doesn't look like a complex driver.
>>>>>
>>>>> That would be nice, I would like to avoid dropping this one.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for clarifying the state of the CEU driver. I did say, that I am
>>>> fine with dropping soc-camera gradually, and I stay with that. But I see
>>>> now, that at least two drivers want to stay active: Atmel ISI and PXA270.
>>>> One possibility is of course to make them independent drivers. If people
>>>> are prepared to invest work into that - sure, would be great! If we
>>>> however decide to keep soc-camera, I could propose the following: IIUC,
>>>> the largest problem is sensor drivers, that cannot be reused for other
>>>> non-soc-camera bridge drivers. The thing is, out of all the sensor drivers
>>>> currently under drivers/media/i2c/soc_camera only a couple are in use on
>>>> those active PXA270 and Atmel boards. I could propose the following:
>>>>
>>>> 1. Remove all bridge drivers, that noone cares about.
>>>> 2. If anyone ever needs to use any of soc-camera-associated sensor
>>>>     drivers, take them out of soc-camera and _remove_ any soc-camera
>>>>     dependencies
>>>> 3. If any soc-camera boards will need that specific driver, which in
>>>>     itself is already unlikely, we'll have to fix that by teaching
>>>>     soc-camera to work with generic sensor drivers!
>>>
>>> That sounds like a good plan.
>>>
>>> Ludovic, any chance someone at Atmel could convert the ISI driver ?
>>
>> I add Songjun to the cc list. I think he has in mind to do this
>> conversion.
>>
>> Songjun, can you confirm?
>>
>> Full thread here:
>> http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.drivers.video-input-infrastructure/99290
>>
> Laurent, I will take the ISI driver, convert it from soc_camera to V4L2.

Great!

I'm happily surprised to see so much interest in replacing these soc-camera
drivers. It seems the time is right to do this.

Songjun, Robert, I think the upcoming r-car v2 patch series from Niklas is
likely to be a good starting point for the isi and pxa drivers to work from.
Besides, his work gave me the inspiration to start this discussion, so he's
to blame :-)

Guennadi, I'll prepare patches to move the omap1 and sh drivers to staging
in preparation of those being removed.

Does anyone know what the status is of the mx2 and mx3 drivers?

Regards,

	Hans