NVIDIA Tegra Video Decode Driver Promoted In Linux 5.18

Part of the mainline kernel has been Tegra-VDE as an originally reverse-engineered NVIDIA Tegra video decode driver. After much work on that driver by developer Dmitry Osipenko, it's been promoted out of "staging" with Linux 5.18 among other media subsystem changes.

The Tegra-VDE driver is being "de-staged" (promoted out of staging) now that its original TODO list has been cleared out, the driver supports Linux's V4L2 stateless video decoding API, and overall is in good shape. Tegra-VDE in Linux 5.18 also drops its legacy user-space API, fully supports the stateless video decode API, and other last minute items addressed.

New to the media subsystem in Linux 5.18 is the Amphion VPU driver that supports the "Windsor" and "Malone" hardware for encoding H.264 with Windsor while Malone additionally supports HEVC and other video formats. This Amphion VPU hardware is found with various NXP SoCs for video encode/decode needs.

Other media work for this new kernel includes the Atmel microchip csi2dc driver, new sensor drivers, Mediatek MT8192 support in the MTK-VCodec driver, and other changes.

More details on the media feature changes for Linux 5.18 via this pull request.