Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588

Great to see progress on mainlining more support for common and powerful chips.

The work required to get this one piece into mainline over 5-6 years reveals why most chip vendors aren’t aiming for mainline by default:

> A few iterations of the rkcif driver later, the basic driver providing support for the PX30 VIP and the RK3568 VICAP was accepted (October 2025). After more than five years of development, including 25 iterations and three renamings, this was a major milestone. On the other hand, there was still a lot to do, of course. For instance, the Rockchip MIPI CSI-2 receiver unit that is coupled closely to the VICAP required a mainline driver as well.

It’s never as simple as submitting existing work upstream and making a few changes. It takes a lot of development and a willingness to rewrite everything, possibly multiple times, to track the goals of upstream.

Good. Video capture on second grade Linux SoCs is hell - lots of blobs and weird custom vendor SDKs that work with the vendor's own happy path use case demos and nothing else.

I hope that the more SoCs get mainline V4L2, the more likely the future SoCs are going to be to use it instead of doing something non-standard and awful.

I guess I don't understand... why would the SOC manufacturer spend the money on integrating this stuff if they don't intend on also spending the money to enable it on the software side?

Worth noting that, well, alas, camera support is incredibly incredibly incredibly cursed, period. It feels like, broadly, with all the image blocks, everyone makes really neat really good hardware thats chock-a-block full of capabilities that are un- or poorly documented or really hard to support for reasons, etc. Its a pretty bespoke high throughput pipeline with a lot of special domain knowledge very unlike anything else on computing.

Intel's IPU6 has been a ~4 year travail to get going (thankfully IPU7 landed fairly quickly however!) https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IPU6-Camera-Challenge-25 https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-IPU7-Linux-6.17

AMD similarly has only just gotten the Strix Halo ISP near working: https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-ISP4-For-Linux-7.2

The whole video world seems like a nightmare. Difficult world of hardware. Just the worst Intellectual Property hostage taking banditry from awful awful valent legally predatory people everywhere, a dark forest ready to leap out of the dark and attack you if you dare use a computing to deal in bits that represent moving images.

Some 3588 CMs are sold out.

So it might be too late as 3688 will be too hot...

Just like routers get dd-wrt when sold out!