Intel Atom ISP Camera Driver Continues Being Cleaned Up In The Linux Kernel

While Intel hasn't released a new Atom SoC in years on the consumer side, thanks to the work by Red Hat engineers and others in the open-source community, even drivers for aging Intel Atom platforms continue to receive improvements. One of the areas of ongoing work has been the Linux kernel driver for the Atom ISP camera interface for image signal processing in supporting the web camera on some of these old devices. With Linux 6.7 there is yet more work on the Intel Atom ISP driver.

Up to now the Intel Atom ISP driver has allowed to be buit for either Atom ISP2401-based hardware that is Anniedale (Merrifield + and Moorefield) along with Cherry Trail SoCs or to target ISP2400-based hardware as Merrifield and Bay Trail. The Atom ISP driver hasn't allowed both the ISP2400 and ISP2401 support to exist in the same driver build. With Linux 6.7 this finally changes where there is run-time support for using ISP2400 and ISP2401 from the same driver build. Thus the Kconfig switch for splitting up this support has been removed.

The Atom ISP code in Linux 6.7 also drops its specific OV5693 driver code as now the upstream OV5693 driver can be used with the Atom ISP code. Cleaning up this Atom ISP mess helps make the media subsystem's updates for Linux 6.7 drop more lines of code than it's adding this cycle.

New to the media subsystem in Linux 6.7 is adding the MGB4 driver for Digiteq Automotive MGB4 hardware used as a frame-grabber PCIe card used for automotive video interfaces.

Also new is the NPCM-Video platform video driver for Nuvoton NPCM SoCs. This driver controls the Video Capture and Differentiation (VCD) engine and Encoding Compression Engine (ECE) on these SoCs used as BMCs.

More details on the media subsystem changes merged this week for Linux 6.7 can be found via this merge. Meanwhile the merge window ends later today with the release of Linux 6.7-rc1.