DRM Format Modifiers in v4l2

[Brian Starkey <brian.starkey@arm.com>]

Hi all,

I couldn't find this topic talked about elsewhere, but apologies if
it's a duplicate - I'll be glad to be steered in the direction of a
thread.

We'd like to support DRM format modifiers in v4l2 in order to share
the description of different (mostly proprietary) buffer formats
between e.g. a v4l2 device and a DRM device.

DRM format modifiers are defined in include/uapi/drm/drm_fourcc.h and
are a vendor-namespaced 64-bit value used to describe various
vendor-specific buffer layouts. They are combined with a (DRM) FourCC
code to give a complete description of the data contained in a buffer.

The same modifier definition is used in the Khronos EGL extension
EGL_EXT_image_dma_buf_import_modifiers, and is supported in the
Wayland linux-dmabuf protocol.


This buffer information could of course be described in the
vendor-specific part of V4L2_PIX_FMT_*, but this would duplicate the
information already defined in drm_fourcc.h. Additionally, there
would be quite a format explosion where a device supports a dozen or
more formats, all of which can use one or more different
layouts/compression schemes.

So, I'm wondering if anyone has views on how/whether this could be
incorporated?

I spoke briefly about this to Laurent at LPC last year, and he
suggested v4l2_control as one approach.

I also wondered if could be added in v4l2_pix_format_mplane - looks
like there's 8 bytes left before it exceeds the 200 bytes, or could go
in the reserved portion of v4l2_plane_pix_format.

Thanks for any thoughts,
-Brian