Intel Visual Sensing Controller Enablement Work Continues For Linux 6.8

Linux 6.6 brought an initial Intel Visual Sensing Controller "IVSC" driver. The Intel IVSC drivers have long been out-of-tree for use with Alder Lake laptops and newer. Linux 6.7 brought the La Jolla Cove Adadpter driver code as part of the IVSC controller. With Linux 6.8 there's yet more work landing on the IVSC front.

The Intel Visual Sensing Controller hardware is found with modern Intel Core laptops and tied into the web camera can be used for proximity sensors and ultimately enabling functionality like locking the screen when walking away from the computer, waking up the display on approach, and related "smart" features.

Intel described this sensing controller previously as a "secure companion chip that helps make PCs more smart and secure through the power of Intel artificial intelligence." With the "secure" aspect, yes, it does tie into the Intel Management Engine... There's already been some IVSC MEI bits merged in prior kernel versions while for Linux 6.8 is additional enablement.

Queued this past week into the char/misc subsystem's char-misc-next branch is a MEI transport driver for the IVSC device and enabling the MEI hardware support of the IVSC device.

"The Intel visual sensing controller (IVSC) device is designed to control the camera sharing between host IPU for media usage and IVSC for context sensing (face detection).

IVSC is exposed to HOST as an SPI device and the message protocol over the SPI BUS for communicating with the IVSC device is implemented. This is the backend of mei framework for IVSC device, which usually handles the hardware data transfer. The mei_csi and mei_ace are the clients of IVSC mei framework.

The firmware downloading for the IVSC device is implemented as well."

So for those interested in this Intel "smart" technology with their latest laptops, the latest IVSC bits are set to be merged with the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle.