Re: Raspberry Pi camera under NetBSD current

[Dave Tyson <dtyson%anduin.org.uk@localhost>]

On Monday 01 Nov 2021 09:42:57 Michael van Elst wrote:
> dtyson%anduin.org.uk@localhost (Dave Tyson) writes:
> >> Trying to access the camera with raspistill however ends in a crash
> >> in the vchiq driver.
> >
> >Thanks for the data point. I guess there may be significant differences in
> >the microcode files between the RPI1B and RPI3b+, but at least the kernel
> >loaded OK for you so the sdcard driver works. I have turned on debugging
> >for the broadcom sdcard hooks and got a few hints as to where the problem
> >lies - but need to look closely at the source to pin point the failure. Of
> >course, even if I can get further I may still suffer the same crash with
> >raspistill. FreeBSD works OK and I can get pictures, so I know it is
> >achievable.
> I had a little success now with the camara and raspistill.
> 
> http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/misc/mlelstv/cam.jpg
> 
> The file is slightly corrupted (truncated?) but can be displayed.

I pulled down the latest snapshot produced by  Jun Ebihara on 6th November. 
This boots fine on a Raspberry 1B & Pi zero but not on a Pi zero 2. The 
snapshot does not include start_x.elf and start_db.elf and associated fixup 
files so I used the 4 sets of start/fixup versions shipped with raspian and 
the system booted OK with start_x=1 in the config file.

The good news is raspistill worked fine with the --nopreview option and I 
could capture a reasonable image OK. (if you omit the --nopreview option it 
succeeds in displaying the image but crashes shortly after)

I tried to get it to take a sequence of still shots at a rate of 10/sec (using 
-tl 100) and that seemed to work OK, but after a while the kernel reports:

dwc2_host_complete: unknown error status -54 a couple of times 
and then a slew of usb devices detach including the ethernet, keyboard etc. 
and that seems to be game over :-(

Still at least its progress. I notice that there is an open source camera 
stack for Raspberry Pi using libcamera - might have a play with that under 
raspian and see if it can be ported to NetBSD.

https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/an-open-source-camera-stack-for-raspberry-pi-using-libcamera/

Dave