Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference Europe 2020

Image Signal Processing (ISP) units are hardware accelerators attached to camera sensors. Coming with more and more features, ISPs are essential nowadays for phones and tablet devices, capable of capturing pictures with high quality resolution and several image effects and filters.

The Media subsystem in the kernel offers a framework and defines APIs for ISP drivers to be upstreamed. There are different ways to model the hardware and expose its capabilities and features to userspace through a Media topology, which reflects the complexity of the hardware. Cameras are becoming more and more complex, making it necessary for drivers in userspace, and this is where the libcamera project comes into play.

In this talk, Helen will share a bit of her experience upstreaming the Rockchip ISP1 driver, going over the topics mentioned above, also comparing with other ISPs hardware/driver architectures and sharing tips and lessons learned along the way, to hopefully be useful for other willing to upstream another ISP driver.