Re: [PATCH 08/14] media: sunxi: Add support for the A31 MIPI CSI-2 controller

[Paul Kocialkowski]

Hi,

On Mon 02 Nov 20, 10:21, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 30, 2020 at 07:45:18PM -0300, Helen Koike wrote:
> > On 10/23/20 2:45 PM, Paul Kocialkowski wrote:
> > > The A31 MIPI CSI-2 controller is a dedicated MIPI CSI-2 controller
> > > found on Allwinner SoCs such as the A31 and V3/V3s.
> > > 
> > > It is a standalone block, connected to the CSI controller on one side
> > > and to the MIPI D-PHY block on the other. It has a dedicated address
> > > space, interrupt line and clock.
> > > 
> > > Currently, the MIPI CSI-2 controller is hard-tied to a specific CSI
> > > controller (CSI0) but newer SoCs (such as the V5) may allow switching
> > > MIPI CSI-2 controllers between CSI controllers.
> > > 
> > > It is represented as a V4L2 subdev to the CSI controller and takes a
> > > MIPI CSI-2 sensor as its own subdev, all using the fwnode graph and
> > > media controller API.
> > 
> > Maybe this is a bad idea, but I was thinking:
> > This driver basically just turn on/off and catch some interrupts for errors,
> > and all the rest of v4l2 config you just forward to the next subdevice
> > on the pipeline.
> > 
> > So instead of exposing it as a subdevice, I was wondering if modeling
> > this driver also through the phy subsystem wouldn't be cleaner, so
> > you won't need all the v4l2 subdevice/topology boilerplate code that
> > it seems you are not using (unless you have plans to add controls or
> > some specific configuration on this node later).
> > 
> > But this would require changes on the sun6i-csi driver.
> > 
> > What do you think?
> 
> Eventually we'll need to filter the virtual channels / datatypes I
> guess, so it's definitely valuable to have it in v4l2

Agreed and like I mentionned in the discussion on 00/14 I don't think it
would be a cleaner way to expose things.

There's also the fact that newer SoCs like the V5 seem to allow connecting
any MIPI CSI-2 controller to any CSI controller, so the graph representation
is definitely welcome here.

Paul

-- 
Paul Kocialkowski, Bootlin
Embedded Linux and kernel engineering
https://bootlin.com

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