Raspberry Pi "PiSP" Driver Landing Upstream For Raspberry Pi 5 Camera System

All of the media subsystem feature updates for the in-development Linux 6.11 kernel were sent out overnight. Arguably most notable with the media driver changes for the new kernel is introducing the Raspberry Pi "PiSP" driver for the image signal processor (ISP) found with the Raspberry Pi 5 for powering its camera system.

The Linux 6.11 media pull request is merging the Raspberry Pi PiSP back-end ISP driver. This PiSP driver was explained by Ideas on Board developer Jacopo Mondi in the patches as:

"Add support for the Raspberry Pi PiSP Back End memory-2-memory ISP.

The PiSP Back End is the memory-2-memory ISP found on Raspberry Pi 5. In conjunction with the PiSP Front End, for which a driver is expected to hit mainline in the next weeks, it implements the Raspberry Pi 5 camera system.

The ISP is fully supported in the Raspberry Pi libcamera version and once patches for the PiSP Front End will hit mainline the support will land in mainline libcamera as well."

The Raspberry Pi 5 Image Signal Processor boasts simplified camera tuning compared to earlier Raspberry Pi boards, is capable of handling 4K@60, and is adaptable for a wider range of applications and use-cases compared to earlier Raspberry Pi ISP IP. Now to get the front-end support upstreamed too for nice Raspberry Pi 5 camera support with the mainline kernel.

The media pull request for Linux 6.11 also adds a new "e5010" JPEG encoder driver, the Wave5 driver can now handle HEVC decoding, and there are various other media driver enhancements.