Hi Alex, On Sunday 31 August 2008, Alex Hixon wrote: > Hi Laurent, > > Way back in April last year, Sam Revitch sent an email to > linux-uvc-devel[1] announcing the work he had been doing on r5u870, which > provided a working webcam to those users with cameras using the Ricoh > chipset. In January this year, I took up the task of maintaining the driver > (since Sam had seemingly gone MIA). Maintaining an out-of-kernel driver and > having very little time to tend to it (we now support 15 different camera > models, up from 3 ;) has become very difficult as of late, and bug reports > regarding conflicts between the r5u870 and uvcvideo modules seem to > becoming more and more frequent. uvcvideo also seems to do a better job at > the UVC stuff than the other driver on most devices, anyway. > > I've done a bit of hacking in an effort to retrofit uvcvideo with the > firmware-loading functionality of the original r5u870 driver. It appears to > work reasonably well. However, before I go and work on something worth > committing, I was just curious as to whether I should be attempting to > implement it in the kernel module (less work for me :) or as a userspace > application.
I've discussed firmware loading issues previously with iSight developers, and I wasn't very keen on adding firmware loading support to the UVC driver, especially with a userspace utility already available (the iSight is based on a Cypress chip). How do Ricoh webcams enumerate when the firmware is not loaded ? Is the firmware loading protocol specific to Ricoh devices ? > One thing that might be an issue that I'm not sure was ever resolved in the > communication between yourself and Chris was that regarding the UVC > controls. As you might remember, the microcode that gets uploaded to the > camera doesn't report all the controls it supports. Would it be possible to > use some of the quirk modes provided by uvcvideo to get around that? Could you list the Ricoh "features" that are not UVC-compliant ? Are the non-reported controls addressed with standard UVC requests or with a proprietary protocol ? Best regards, Laurent Pinchart _______________________________________________ Linux-uvc-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/linux-uvc-devel
