The growing image-processor unpleasantness

Re:The growing image-processor unpleasantness by sneak on Friday August 19, 2022 @02:24AM (#32518028)

> no SoC vendor is willing today to open their imaging algorithms.

I know at least in rPI land this is not a matter of unwillingness but inability: the GPU boot blobs are protected under copyright law by upstream licenses that do not permit distribution of the source (which is not f/oss anyway).

It’s like three vendors removed (GPU firmware author, SoC maker, board maker). I imagine the ISP situation is somewhat similar; Intel probably has licensed some of this code versus making all of it from scratch.

The firmware industry is like an alternate reality where f/oss never happened, it seems. People guard their codez as jealously as the underground blackhat scene.

Code libraries for implementing stuff in hardware (on FPGAs) is literally referred to as “IP”. The mind reels. Totally different culture over there.

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Re:The growing image-processor unpleasantness by rasz on Friday August 19, 2022 @03:01AM (#32518209)

in the case of image processing it was "we paid a lot of money for it so you cant have it without drm"

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=16989#p16951

>The GPU contains a very sophisticated ISP - the pipeline of image processing to get some raw camera data to pretty JPG's. This pipeline also needs to be 'tuned' to the particular camera and this can take some times (months for a specialised team to do a really good job) >All the work above needs to be done for each new camera module - and will be done for any camera sold for the Raspi.

Raspi cameras ship with drm https://gist.github.com/marcan/6dde73a9a0c917cd4fc9784a0a73e...

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Re:The growing image-processor unpleasantness by cleverca22 on Friday August 19, 2022 @04:51AM (#32518789)

libcamera also supports the rpi and moves all of that control loop stuff into linux userland, so you would think there are no secrets left

but the actual register writes to drive the ISP are still in the blob, and libcamera is just telling the blob how to tweak every knob in the hardware

it makes no sense why they have opened it up so much, yet still insist on keeping that last bit a secret

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Re:The growing image-processor unpleasantness by techdragon on Friday August 19, 2022 @03:06AM (#32518234)

Don’t discount the nature of the business, a lot of the low level code may never get updated, or even be capable of updates, it’s burned into ROMs and the only thing that might keep their business afloat is the fact they squeezed a bit better performance out of otherwise common parts that one big factory is using to make webcams or other widgets for dozens of indivisible companies selling their own products. It’s unfortunate that they fear competition so greatly they refuse to even document their external interfaces because that might make it slightly easier for someone to work out how their system works, but I don’t fault their decision making.

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