Intel Visual Sensing Controller "IVSC" Driver Support Coming With Linux 6.6

The media subsystem updates were sent out today for the Linux 6.6 kernel and most notably is introducing the Intel IVSC MEI drivers as well as extending the Intel IPU bridge logic to work with these new drivers.

IVSC is for the Intel Visual Sensing Controller and these patches have been through about a dozen revisions before finally being mainlined. This support is needed for the IVSC firmware services for controlling the camera sensor and CSI-2 link through the Intel Image Processing Unit (IPU) Intel driver.

Intel has long been maintaining the ivsc-driver out-of-tree on GitHub for use beginning on Alder Lake mobile platforms. This ultimately is about improving the Linux web camera support for Alder Lake and newer Intel laptops. Leveraging the IVSC will allow for more vision capabilities with context awareness and eventually being able to process image data with an embedded AI engine.

In addition to the Intel IVSC drivers for Linux 6.6, the media subsystem also has new i2c drivers for the ds90ub913, ds90ub953, ds90ub960, dw9719, and ds90ub913 hardware. The Intel AtomISP2 driver was also adapted to work with the ov2680 media driver and as a result the AtomISP2 ov2680 staging driver was removed. The media BTTV driver was also finally adapted to VideoBuf2 from the original VideoBuf framework and as a result the old VideoBuf framework will likely be removed for the v6.7 kernel cycle.

More details on the media driver updates for Linux 6.6 via this pull request.