Documentation/admin-guide/media/vimc.rst
Source file repositories/reference/linux-study-clean/Documentation/admin-guide/media/vimc.rst
File Facts
- System
- Linux kernel
- Corpus path
Documentation/admin-guide/media/vimc.rst- Extension
.rst- Size
- 3354 bytes
- Lines
- 111
- Domain
- Support Tooling And Documentation
- Bucket
- Documentation
- Inferred role
- Support Tooling And Documentation: documentation
- Status
- atlas-only
Why This File Exists
Repository support layer: documentation, build tooling, samples, user-space helper tools, generated initramfs support, licenses, and validation utilities.
- Repository support layer: documentation, build tooling, samples, user-space helper tools, generated initramfs support, licenses, and validation utilities.
- Allocates kernel memory; connect allocation flags and lifetime to context constraints.
Dependency Surface
- No C-style include directives detected by the generator.
Detected Declarations
- No top-level syscall, struct, function, initcall, or export declaration detected by the generator.
Annotated Snippet
.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
The Virtual Media Controller Driver (vimc)
==========================================
The vimc driver emulates complex video hardware using the V4L2 API and the Media
API. It has a capture device and three subdevices: sensor, debayer and scaler.
Topology
--------
The topology is hardcoded, although you could modify it in vimc-core and
recompile the driver to achieve your own topology. This is the default topology:
.. _vimc_topology_graph:
.. kernel-figure:: vimc.dot
:alt: Diagram of the default media pipeline topology
:align: center
Media pipeline graph on vimc
Configuring the topology
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Each subdevice will come with its default configuration (pixelformat, height,
width, ...). One needs to configure the topology in order to match the
configuration on each linked subdevice to stream frames through the pipeline.
If the configuration doesn't match, the stream will fail. The ``v4l-utils``
package is a bundle of user-space applications, that comes with ``media-ctl`` and
``v4l2-ctl`` that can be used to configure the vimc configuration. This sequence
of commands fits for the default topology:
.. code-block:: bash
media-ctl -d platform:vimc -V '"Sensor A":0[fmt:SBGGR8_1X8/640x480]'
media-ctl -d platform:vimc -V '"Debayer A":0[fmt:SBGGR8_1X8/640x480]'
media-ctl -d platform:vimc -V '"Scaler":0[fmt:RGB888_1X24/640x480]'
media-ctl -d platform:vimc -V '"Scaler":0[crop:(100,50)/400x150]'
media-ctl -d platform:vimc -V '"Scaler":1[fmt:RGB888_1X24/300x700]'
v4l2-ctl -z platform:vimc -d "RGB/YUV Capture" -v width=300,height=700
v4l2-ctl -z platform:vimc -d "Raw Capture 0" -v pixelformat=BA81
Subdevices
----------
Subdevices define the behavior of an entity in the topology. Depending on the
subdevice, the entity can have multiple pads of type source or sink.
vimc-sensor:
Generates images in several formats using video test pattern generator.
Exposes:
* 1 Pad source
vimc-lens:
Ancillary lens for a sensor. Supports auto focus control. Linked to
a vimc-sensor using an ancillary link. The lens supports FOCUS_ABSOLUTE
control.
.. code-block:: bash
media-ctl -p
...
- entity 28: Lens A (0 pad, 0 link)
type V4L2 subdev subtype Lens flags 0
device node name /dev/v4l-subdev6
- entity 29: Lens B (0 pad, 0 link)
type V4L2 subdev subtype Lens flags 0
device node name /dev/v4l-subdev7
Annotation
- Atlas domain: Support Tooling And Documentation / Documentation.
- Implementation status: atlas-only.
Implementation Notes
- This generated page is the file-by-file coverage layer; curated subsystem chapters should link here when they synthesize a multi-file control flow.
- Core OS pages should be promoted from atlas-only to deep-reviewed when they explain data structures, invariants, locking, lifecycle, and C implementation snippets.
- Driver-family pages are intentionally pattern-oriented unless they are part of the selected PCIe/NVMe representative device path.