Write a driver for Mars USB cameras

[richienyhus]

MarsCam should be a part of the modular webcam driver.

Chips include the: mr97311a and mr97310a.

[pulkomandy]

Are you sure it is useful to have each of these in a separate ticket? Do you own the hardware to test them? Are there programming specifications? Or are these standard UVC webcams, which is the standard way to do webcams for USB and what we should focus on? (a single driver to rule them all).

[richienyhus]

Replying to pulkomandy:

Are you sure it is useful to have each of these in a separate ticket? Do you own the hardware to test them? Are there programming specifications? Or are these standard UVC webcams, which is the standard way to do webcams for USB and what we should focus on? (a single driver to rule them all).

As these tickets are for ​controller chipsets families and not individual camera devices, mixing them all into one ticket would be confusing, and that is before adding information about the different chips versions and the different sensors that they use.

While I have a few of them, we either don't yet have a driver for them or their sub-driver is currently broken and not building. Some of the chips have an easy to find datasheets, while others will require us to borrow some GPL code from the Linux driver to ever hope of getting it running.

None of these are UVC compliant chipsets (apart a few chips had compliant revisions made), all UVC compliant devices should be covered under the ​UVCCam sub-driver, which is ​missing a large number of device IDs.

[pulkomandy]

The nice thing about UVC is we can detect it by other means than the device IDs, using the device class. Basically the device says itself "I'm a standard webcam". We need some adjustments to do this (handling per-interface classes in the driver, for example).

I think we should put our priority on the standard UVC driver, as implementing all custom chips will take a lot of time and I hope everyone will eventually switch to UVC.