April 13, 2026
Kernel drama meets camera karma
Initial mainline video capture and camera support for Rockchip RK3588
Five-year fight pays off—but is it too late or perfect timing
TLDR: Initial camera and video-capture support for Rockchip chips is finally landing in the main Linux kernel after years of work. Commenters celebrate fewer vendor blobs but argue over timing—some say it’s late for sold‑out boards, others demand chipmakers fund the software so users aren’t stuck waiting.
Open-source devs just pushed the first big pieces of camera and video-capture support for Rockchip’s much-loved RK3588 into the main Linux kernel, and the comments section instantly turned into a soap opera. Fans are clapping for Collabora and the linux‑rockchip crew after a five‑plus‑year marathon of code rewrites, rename dramas, and endless reviews—seriously, the driver was renamed three times. But the vibes aren’t all victory.
One camp beams, saying this finally frees makers from sketchy vendor software kits and mystery “blobs.” Another camp asks the brutal question: why do chip makers build fancy camera hardware and then not fund the software to make it work? A veteran voice sighs that camera pipelines are “cursed”—high-speed, ultra-fiddly, and rarely documented—so of course it took forever. Meanwhile, the resident pessimist claims the RK3588 boards are selling out anyway and jokes it might be “too late,” comparing the scene to routers getting DD‑WRT when they’re already dusty. Through it all, commenters cheer that more parts are landing in “mainline” (the official Linux kernel), hoping future chips just use V4L2 (Video4Linux2, a standard way to handle cameras) and stop reinventing the wheel. TL;DR: hard-won progress, spicy debate, and peak kernel drama—naming things is still the hardest problem.
Key Points
- •Collabora targeted mainline support for Rockchip’s RK3588 video capture and camera pipeline, focusing on the VICAP unit via the rkcif driver.
- •The rkcif driver underwent extensive review since 2020, with Collabora joining in early 2022 and refactoring it into a media-controller-centric V4L2 driver.
- •A basic rkcif driver supporting PX30 VIP and RK3568 VICAP was accepted into mainline Linux in October 2025 after ~25 iterations and multiple renamings.
- •The Rockchip MIPI CSI-2 receiver driver was subsequently merged into the Linux kernel in January 2026 after several iterations and renamings/relocations.
- •Collabora presented progress at Open Source Summit Europe 2025 (Amsterdam) and FOSDEM 2026 (Brussels), highlighting upstream status and ongoing work.