media: Documentation: kapi: Add v4l2 generic ISP support

Add to the driver-api documentation the v4l2-isp.h types and
helpers documentation.

Reviewed-by: Daniel Scally <dan.scally@ideasonboard.com>
Reviewed-by: Michael Riesch <michael.riesch@collabora.com>
Acked-by: Sakari Ailus <sakari.ailus@linux.intel.com>
Reviewed-by: Laurent Pinchart <laurent.pinchart+renesas@ideasonboard.com>
Tested-by: Lad Prabhakar <prabhakar.mahadev-lad.rj@bp.renesas.com>
Signed-off-by: Jacopo Mondi <jacopo.mondi@ideasonboard.com>
Signed-off-by: Hans Verkuil <hverkuil+cisco@kernel.org>

3 files changed, 51 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/Documentation/driver-api/media/v4l2-core.rst b/Documentation/driver-api/media/v4l2-core.rst
index ad987c34ad2a..a5f5102c64cc 100644
--- a/Documentation/driver-api/media/v4l2-core.rst
+++ b/Documentation/driver-api/media/v4l2-core.rst
@@ -27,3 +27,4 @@ Video4Linux devices
     v4l2-common
     v4l2-tveeprom
     v4l2-jpeg
+    v4l2-isp
diff --git a/Documentation/driver-api/media/v4l2-isp.rst b/Documentation/driver-api/media/v4l2-isp.rst
new file mode 100644
index 000000000000..618ae614ff79
--- /dev/null
+++ b/Documentation/driver-api/media/v4l2-isp.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,49 @@
+.. SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0
+
+V4L2 generic ISP parameters and statistics support
+^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+
+Design rationale
+================
+
+ISP configuration parameters and statistics are processed and collected by
+drivers and exchanged with userspace through data types that usually
+reflect the ISP peripheral registers layout.
+
+Each ISP driver defines its own metadata output format for parameters and
+a metadata capture format for statistics. The buffer layout is realized by a
+set of C structures that reflects the registers layout. The number and types
+of C structures is fixed by the format definition and becomes part of the Linux
+kernel uAPI/uABI interface.
+
+Because of the hard requirement of backward compatibility when extending the
+user API/ABI interface, modifying an ISP driver capture or output metadata
+format after it has been accepted by mainline is very hard if not impossible.
+
+It generally happens, in fact, that after the first accepted revision of an ISP
+driver the buffers layout need to be modified, either to support new hardware
+blocks, to fix bugs or to support different revisions of the hardware.
+
+Each of these situations would require defining a new metadata format, making it
+really hard to maintain and extend drivers and requiring userspace to use
+the correct format depending on the kernel revision in use.
+
+V4L2 ISP configuration parameters
+=================================
+
+For these reasons, Video4Linux2 defines generic types for ISP configuration
+parameters and statistics. Drivers are still expected to define their own
+formats for their metadata output and capture nodes, but the buffers layout can
+be defined using the extensible and versioned types defined by
+include/uapi/linux/media/v4l2-isp.h.
+
+Drivers are expected to provide the definitions of their supported ISP blocks
+and the expected maximum size of a buffer.
+
+For driver developers a set of helper functions to assist them with validation
+of the buffer received from userspace is available in
+drivers/media/v4l2-core/v4l2-isp.c
+
+V4L2 ISP support driver documentation
+=====================================
+.. kernel-doc:: include/media/v4l2-isp.h
diff --git a/MAINTAINERS b/MAINTAINERS
index e4c8b2d533bd..ebe6e75b1a2f 100644
--- a/MAINTAINERS
+++ b/MAINTAINERS
@@ -26889,6 +26889,7 @@ V4L2 GENERIC ISP PARAMETERS AND STATISTIC FORMATS
 M:	Jacopo Mondi <jacopo.mondi@ideasonboard.com>
 L:	linux-media@vger.kernel.org
 S:	Maintained
+F:	Documentation/driver-api/media/v4l2-isp.rst
 F:	Documentation/userspace-api/media/v4l/v4l2-isp.rst
 F:	drivers/media/v4l2-core/v4l2-isp.c
 F:	include/media/v4l2-isp.h