Mainline Linux Kernel Starts Seeing A NVIDIA Tegra X1 Video Input Driver

While the Tegra X1 SoC (Tegra210) has been available for several years, finally with the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel is a mainline driver contributed by NVIDIA for the video input support.

The Tegra X1 features a high-end video input controller that can support up to six MIPI CSI camera sensors concurrently.

This new driver coming in Linux 5.8 provides a Video 4 Linux 2 (V4L2) compatible driver. But before getting too excited over this NVIDIA Tegra video input driver, the state in Linux 5.8 just supports capturing the hardware's built-in test pattern generator.

Still on the TODO list is to "add real camera sensor capture support" and other features like ganged mode, support for system suspend and resume, and ensuring compliance against V4L2 tests.

So for now there is this 3k+ lines of code driver in the SoC for-next branch ahead of Linux 5.8. But this initial state for the years old SoC is just reading the text pattern generator (TPG) rather than the six camera sensors supported by this SoC. For those wanting to make use of the video input controller for now are best off using NVIDIA's downstream kernel.