broadcom BCM_VC_SM removal from >=5.10.y kernels

Open
#4,167 7 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
30/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
c, linux

Research direction

Start by comparing drivers/staging/vc04_services/vc-sm-cma/vc_sm.c with the existing drivers/char/broadcom/vc_sm/ implementation and its Kconfig and Makefile entries. Check how BCM_VC_SM is configured and built in kernels from 5.10 onward. Done means the broadcom character device is available on recent Raspberry Pi kernels and supports the stated Kodi HEVC decoding use case.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

Hi folks,

drivers/staging/vc04_services/vc-sm-cma/vc_sm.c as configured by kernel configuration option: BCM_VC_SM has been removed from 5.10.y kernels and onwards.

It seems like this allowed kodi-rbpi to perform optimal hevc decoding through mmal, thus kodi-rbpi works smooth on kernels:
5.4.44, 5.4.83, 5.4.y and previous

but does not work on anything after it, such as 5.10.x and 5.11.0.

Can we have this broadcom char device re-added to the more recent kernels, same way it exists on 5.4.x:

./drivers/char/broadcom/vc_sm/Makefile:obj-$(CONFIG_BCM_VC_SM) := vc-sm.o
./drivers/char/broadcom/Kconfig:config BCM_VC_SM
./drivers/char/broadcom/Makefile:obj-$(CONFIG_BCM_VC_SM)         += vc_sm/

This will allow raspberrypi 3 devices to run more recent kernels with kodi-rbpi binaries which decode hevc pretty recently.
Thanks

Dominant language
C
Stars
13.2k
Forks
5.5k
Avg merge
2d 21h
Merged PRs (30d)
21

Contributor guide

No contributing guide indexed for this repository

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

More from raspberrypi/linux

All issues in raspberrypi/linux

Similar issues

More C issues

Get new issues in your inbox

A short digest of beginner-friendly GitHub issues.