Some notes about the working of the atomisp drivers (learned while working on cleaning it up). The atomisp seems to be a generic DSP(ISP) like processor without a fixed pipeline. It does not have its own memory, but instead uses main memory. The ISP has its own address-space and main memory needs to be mapped into its address space through the ISP's MMU. Memory is allocated by the hmm code. hmm_alloc() returns an ISP virtual address. The hmm code keeps a list of all allocations and when necessary the hmm code finds the backing hmm-buffer-object (hmm_bo) by looking up the hmm_bo based on the ISP virtual address. The actual processing pipeline is made by loading one or more programs, called binaries. The shisp_240??0_v21.bin firmware file contains many different binaries. Binaries are picked by filling a ia_css_binary_descr struct with various input and output parameters and then calling ia_css_binary_find(). Some binaries support creating multiple outputs (preview + video frame?) at the same time. For example for the /dev/video0 preview node load_preview_binaries() from atomisp/pci/sh_css.c is called and then loads a preview and optionally a scalar binary. Note when digital zoom is disabled (it is enabled by default) only the preview binary is loaded. So in this case a single binary handles the entire pipeline. Since getting a picture requires multiple processing steps, this means that unlike in fixed pipelines the soft pipelines on the ISP can do multiple processing steps in a single pipeline element (in a single binary). ### The sensor drivers use of v4l2_get_subdev_hostdata(), which returns a camera_mipi_info struct. This struct is allocated/managed by the core atomisp code. The most important parts of the struct are filled by the atomisp core itself, like e.g. the port number. Other members of camera_mipi_info which are set by some drivers are: -metadata_width, metadata_height, metadata_effective_width, set by the ov5693 driver (and used by the atomisp core) -raw_bayer_order, adjusted by the ov2680 driver when flipping since flipping can change the bayer order