Hi Hans
Thanks for the great summary.
On Wed, 13 Nov 2024 at 18:57, Hans de Goede hdegoede@redhat.com wrote:
Hi Ricardo,
On 12-Nov-24 6:30 PM, Ricardo Ribalda wrote:
Some notebooks have a button to disable the camera (not to be mistaken with the mechanical cover). This is a standard GPIO linked to the camera via the ACPI table.
4 years ago we added support for this button in UVC via the Privacy control. This has three issues:
- If the camera has its own privacy control, it will be masked.
- We need to power-up the camera to read the privacy control gpio.
- Other drivers have not followed this approach and have used evdev.
We tried to fix the power-up issues implementing "granular power saving" but it has been more complicated than anticipated...
This patchset implements the Privacy GPIO as a evdev.
The first patch of this set is already in Laurent's tree... but I include it to get some CI coverage.
Signed-off-by: Ricardo Ribalda ribalda@chromium.org
Changes in v3:
- CodeStyle (Thanks Sakari)
- Re-implement as input device
Thank you for your enthusiasm for my suggestion to implement this as an input device.
I wanted to give it a try... and it turned out to be quite simple to implement. I thought it could be a good idea to share it, so we can have something tangible to talk about ;).
As I mentioned in my reply in the v2 thread, the goal of my enumeration of various way camera privacy-controls are exposed to userspace today is to try and get everyone to agree on a single userspace API for this.
Except for this v3 patch-set, which I take as an implied vote from you (Ricardo) for the evdev SW_CAMERA_LENS_COVER approach, we have not heard anything on this subject from Sakari or Laurent yet. So for now I would like to first focus on / circle back to the userspace API discussion and then once we have a plan for the userspace API we can implement that for uvcvideo.
First lets look at the API question top down, iow what use-cases do we expect there to be for information about the camera-privacy switch state:
a) Having an app which is using (trying to use) the camera show a notification to the user that the camera is turned-off by a privacy switch .
Ricardo, AFAICT this is the main use-case for chrome-os, do I have this right ?
b) is as important as a) for us. If you do not give instant feedback to the user when they change the status of the camera they might not be able to find the button later on :)
b) Showing on on-screen-display (OSD) with a camera / crossed-out-camera icon when the switch is toggled, similar to how muting speakers/mic show an OSD . Laptop vendor Windows add-on software does this and I know that some users have been asking for this.
Then lets look at the question bottom-up which hardware interfaces do we have exposing this information:
- Internal UVC camera with an input privacy GPIO resource in
the ACPI fwnode for the UVC camera, with the GPIO reporting the privacy-switch state. Found on some chrome-books
- Laptop firmware (EC/ACPI/WMI) which reports privacy-switch
state, without a clear 1:1 relation between the reported state and which camera it applies to. In this case sometimes the whole UVC camera module (if it is UVC) is simply dropped of the bus when the camera is disabled through the privacy switch, removing the entire /dev/video# node for the camera. Found on many windows laptops.
- UVC cameras which report privacy-switch status through
a UVC_CT_PRIVACY_CONTROL. Found on ... ?
Some logitech cameras and also internal ones.
Note this will only work while the camera is streaming and even then may require polling of the ctrl because not all cameras reliably send UVC status messages when it changes. This renders this hardware interface as not usable
Currently there are 2 ways this info is being communicated to userspace, hw-interfaces 1. + 3. are exposed as a v4l2 privacy-ctrl where as hw-if 2. uses and input evdev device.
The advantage of the v4l2 privacy-ctrl is that it makes it very clear which camera is controlled by the camera privacy-switch.
The disadvantage is that it will not work for hw-if 2, because the ACPI / WMI drivers have no v4l2 device to report the control on. We could try to add some magic glue code, but even then with e.g. IPU6 cameras it would still be unclear which v4l2(sub)device we should put the control on and if a UVC camera is just dropped from the bus there is no /dev/video# device at all.
Using an input device does not has this disadvantage and it has the advantage of not requiring to power-up the camera as currently happens with a v4l2 ctrl on a UVC camera.
But using an input device makes it harder to determine which camera the privacy-switch applies to. We can specify that SW_CAMERA_LENS_COVER only applies to device internal cameras, but then it is up to userspace to determine which cameras that are.
I am working on wiring up this to userspace right now.. I will report back if it cannot do it.
Another problem with using an input device is that it will not work for "UVC cameras which report privacy-switch status through a UVC_CT_PRIVACY_CONTROL." since those need the camera on and even then need to be polled to get a reliable reading.
Taking this all into account my proposal would be to go with an input device and document that SW_CAMERA_LENS_COVER only applies to device internal cameras.
This should work well for both use-cases a) and b) described above and also be easy to support for both hw interfaces
- and 2.
My proposal for hw-if 3. (UVC_CT_PRIVACY_CONTROL) would be to keep reporting this as V4L2_CID_PRIVACY. This means it will not work out of the box for userspace which expects the input device method, but giving the limitations of this hw interface I think that requiring userspace to have to explicitly support this use-case (and e.g. poll the control) is a good thing rather then a bad thing.
Still before moving forward with switching the hw-if 1. case to an input device as this patch-series does I would like to hear input from others.
Sakari, Laurent, any comments ?
Regards,
Hans
- Make the code depend on UVC_INPUT_EVDEV
- Link to v2: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20241108-uvc-subdev-v2-0-85d8a051a3d3@chromium.org
Changes in v2:
- Rebase on top of https://patchwork.linuxtv.org/project/linux-media/patch/20241106-uvc-crashrm...
- Create uvc_gpio_cleanup and uvc_gpio_deinit
- Refactor quirk: do not disable irq
- Change define number for MEDIA_ENT_F_GPIO
- Link to v1: https://lore.kernel.org/r/20241031-uvc-subdev-v1-0-a68331cedd72@chromium.org
Ricardo Ribalda (8): media: uvcvideo: Fix crash during unbind if gpio unit is in use media: uvcvideo: Factor out gpio functions to its own file media: uvcvideo: Re-implement privacy GPIO as an input device Revert "media: uvcvideo: Allow entity-defined get_info and get_cur" media: uvcvideo: Create ancillary link for GPIO subdevice media: v4l2-core: Add new MEDIA_ENT_F_GPIO media: uvcvideo: Use MEDIA_ENT_F_GPIO for the GPIO entity media: uvcvideo: Introduce UVC_QUIRK_PRIVACY_DURING_STREAM
.../userspace-api/media/mediactl/media-types.rst | 4 + drivers/media/usb/uvc/Kconfig | 2 +- drivers/media/usb/uvc/Makefile | 3 + drivers/media/usb/uvc/uvc_ctrl.c | 40 +----- drivers/media/usb/uvc/uvc_driver.c | 112 +--------------- drivers/media/usb/uvc/uvc_entity.c | 21 ++- drivers/media/usb/uvc/uvc_gpio.c | 144 +++++++++++++++++++++ drivers/media/usb/uvc/uvc_status.c | 13 +- drivers/media/usb/uvc/uvc_video.c | 4 + drivers/media/usb/uvc/uvcvideo.h | 31 +++-- drivers/media/v4l2-core/v4l2-async.c | 3 +- include/uapi/linux/media.h | 1 + 12 files changed, 223 insertions(+), 155 deletions(-)
base-commit: 1b3bb4d69f20be5931abc18a6dbc24ff687fa780 change-id: 20241030-uvc-subdev-89f4467a00b5
Best regards,