alt Hacker NewsGreat 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.
Replies
> why most chip vendors aren’t aiming for mainline by default:
> It’s never as simple as submitting existing work upstream and making a few changes.
If they had started by working with upstream, then they wouldn't have to go through unnecessary revisions trying to adapt the thing they already wrote.
I really feel like that should be table stakes if your entire business is making chips to run Linux, though
after working professionally with their stuff I'm really not a fan of Rockchip