Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

Aurornis•about 4 hours ago

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.

Palomides•about 3 hours ago

I really feel like that should be table stakes if your entire business is making chips to run Linux, though

after working professionally with their stuff I'm really not a fan of Rockchip

Aurornis•about 3 hours ago

I wish everything was mainlined right away, too, but I’m realistic about what it takes to get that done.

There are chip providers that put more emphasis on mainline support but even those aren’t fully mainlined and their chips are generally much more expensive.

packetlost•about 3 hours ago

Why is that? IME pretty much all of their software is a mess and the hardware has some bugs/issues iirc but is otherwise ok?

4fterd4rk•about 3 hours ago

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?

EdNutting•about 3 hours ago

Software != Linux Mainline.

Software exists from the vendor, but it’s not open source and/or not part of Linux mainline.

Hence the effort to develop an open source (and mainlined) alternative.

Whether this is a good use of effort and/or whether you believe the vendor should be doing the Linux development or not, and:or whether they should open-source their proprietary drivers, will depend on your personal views.

jauntywundrkind•about 2 hours ago

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.

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.

bullen•about 3 hours ago

Some 3588 CMs are sold out.

So it might be too late as 3688 will be too hot...

Just like routers get dd-wrt when sold out!

Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

⚡ Community Insights

Discussion (11 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews