Re: [PATCH 00/15] Intel IPU6 and IPU6 input system drivers

[claus.stovgaard@gmail.com]

On Mon, 2023-08-21 at 15:19 +0300, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> Hi Claus,
> 
> On Mon, Aug 21, 2023 at 12:07:59PM +0200, Claus Stovgaard wrote:
> > On Mon, 2023-08-21 at 08:55 +0200, Claus Stovgaard wrote:
> > > 
> > > Looking forward to try your branch. Looks much cleaner, and would
> > > be
> > > nice to get working :)
> > 
> > I got it to work on Dell XPS 9320.
> 
> I'm glad to hear this ! Even if PSYS support will be needed to make
> the
> IPU6 truly usable, it is a very nice step in the right direction.
> 
> Would you be interested in adding initial support for the IPU6 in
> libcamera ? :-) Given that only the ISYS is currently available, and
> given the simplicity of the hardware, it may be as easy as a single
> line
> addition.
> 
> 

Hi Laurent.

Thanks for your offer - it might come in handy to have libcamera
support, but I don't need it right now.

My use case is a bit special. I am working as Embedded Engineer for
Ambu A/S, where we have 2 display units, named aView2 and aBox2, for
single use endoscopy.

https://youtu.be/eDcSrHxzZ70?t=14

Those units is based on the intel Apollo Lake with IPU4, where only the
isys part of IPU4 is used, as a FPGA in front of the Apollo Lake is
used for image processing. So the image stream is sent to the Apollo
Lake as RGB data - and is using the IPU4 isys as DMA. E.g. like below.

scope -> FPGA -> tc358748 -> IPU4-> memory

We need to support this for newer kernels, then provided from intel
(4.14 / 4.19) and looking at the code, it seems like a better option to
base it on this IPU6 isys driver and extend it to cover IPU4 isys also.

So we are being inspired by the provided 4.14 / 4.19 kernel, and then
work on the IPU6 codebase.

Our current status is that my coworker has the Buttress to load the
firmware on IPU4, and we will continue work from there.

My end goal would be that an upstream vanilla kernel is able to support
the isys part of IPU4, and the complete IPU6.

Regards
Claus