V4L/DVB (8799): soc-camera: add API documentation

Signed-off-by: Guennadi Liakhovetski <g.liakhovetski@gmx.de>
Acked-by: Hans Verkuil <hverkuil@xs4all.nl>
Signed-off-by: Mauro Carvalho Chehab <mchehab@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 120 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/video4linux/soc-camera.txt b/Documentation/video4linux/soc-camera.txt
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+                        Soc-Camera Subsystem
+                        ====================
+
+Terminology
+-----------
+
+The following terms are used in this document:
+ - camera / camera device / camera sensor - a video-camera sensor chip, capable
+   of connecting to a variety of systems and interfaces, typically uses i2c for
+   control and configuration, and a parallel or a serial bus for data.
+ - camera host - an interface, to which a camera is connected. Typically a
+   specialised interface, present on many SoCs, e.g., PXA27x and PXA3xx, SuperH,
+   AVR32, i.MX27, i.MX31.
+ - camera host bus - a connection between a camera host and a camera. Can be
+   parallel or serial, consists of data and control lines, e.g., clock, vertical
+   and horizontal synchronization signals.
+
+Purpose of the soc-camera subsystem
+-----------------------------------
+
+The soc-camera subsystem provides a unified API between camera host drivers and
+camera sensor drivers. It implements a V4L2 interface to the user, currently
+only the mmap method is supported.
+
+This subsystem has been written to connect drivers for System-on-Chip (SoC)
+video capture interfaces with drivers for CMOS camera sensor chips to enable
+the reuse of sensor drivers with various hosts. The subsystem has been designed
+to support multiple camera host interfaces and multiple cameras per interface,
+although most applications have only one camera sensor.
+
+Existing drivers
+----------------
+
+As of 2.6.27-rc4 there are two host drivers in the mainline: pxa_camera.c for
+PXA27x SoCs and sh_mobile_ceu_camera.c for SuperH SoCs, and four sensor drivers:
+mt9m001.c, mt9m111.c, mt9v022.c and a generic soc_camera_platform.c driver. This
+list is not supposed to be updated, look for more examples in your tree.
+
+Camera host API
+---------------
+
+A host camera driver is registered using the
+
+soc_camera_host_register(struct soc_camera_host *);
+
+function. The host object can be initialized as follows:
+
+static struct soc_camera_host pxa_soc_camera_host = {
+        .drv_name       = PXA_CAM_DRV_NAME,
+        .ops            = &pxa_soc_camera_host_ops,
+};
+
+All camera host methods are passed in a struct soc_camera_host_ops:
+
+static struct soc_camera_host_ops pxa_soc_camera_host_ops = {
+        .owner          = THIS_MODULE,
+        .add            = pxa_camera_add_device,
+        .remove         = pxa_camera_remove_device,
+        .suspend        = pxa_camera_suspend,
+        .resume         = pxa_camera_resume,
+        .set_fmt_cap    = pxa_camera_set_fmt_cap,
+        .try_fmt_cap    = pxa_camera_try_fmt_cap,
+        .init_videobuf  = pxa_camera_init_videobuf,
+        .reqbufs        = pxa_camera_reqbufs,
+        .poll           = pxa_camera_poll,
+        .querycap       = pxa_camera_querycap,
+        .try_bus_param  = pxa_camera_try_bus_param,
+        .set_bus_param  = pxa_camera_set_bus_param,
+};
+
+.add and .remove methods are called when a sensor is attached to or detached
+from the host, apart from performing host-internal tasks they shall also call
+sensor driver's .init and .release methods respectively. .suspend and .resume
+methods implement host's power-management functionality and its their
+responsibility to call respective sensor's methods. .try_bus_param and
+.set_bus_param are used to negotiate physical connection parameters between the
+host and the sensor. .init_videobuf is called by soc-camera core when a
+video-device is opened, further video-buffer management is implemented completely
+by the specific camera host driver. The rest of the methods are called from
+respective V4L2 operations.
+
+Camera API
+----------
+
+Sensor drivers can use struct soc_camera_link, typically provided by the
+platform, and used to specify to which camera host bus the sensor is connected,
+and arbitrarily provide platform .power and .reset methods for the camera.
+soc_camera_device_register() and soc_camera_device_unregister() functions are
+used to add a sensor driver to or remove one from the system. The registration
+function takes a pointer to struct soc_camera_device as the only parameter.
+This struct can be initialized as follows:
+
+        /* link to driver operations */
+        icd->ops        = &mt9m001_ops;
+        /* link to the underlying physical (e.g., i2c) device */
+        icd->control    = &client->dev;
+        /* window geometry */
+        icd->x_min      = 20;
+        icd->y_min      = 12;
+        icd->x_current  = 20;
+        icd->y_current  = 12;
+        icd->width_min  = 48;
+        icd->width_max  = 1280;
+        icd->height_min = 32;
+        icd->height_max = 1024;
+        icd->y_skip_top = 1;
+        /* camera bus ID, typically obtained from platform data */
+        icd->iface      = icl->bus_id;
+
+struct soc_camera_ops provides .probe and .remove methods, which are called by
+the soc-camera core, when a camera is matched against or removed from a camera
+host bus, .init, .release, .suspend, and .resume are called from the camera host
+driver as discussed above. Other members of this struct provide respective V4L2
+functionality.
+
+struct soc_camera_device also links to an array of struct soc_camera_data_format,
+listing pixel formats, supported by the camera.
+
+--
+Author: Guennadi Liakhovetski <g.liakhovetski@gmx.de>