On Sonntag, 15. Januar 2023 21:14:12 CET John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
On 1/15/23 20:50, Hans-Peter Jansen wrote:
But this will make a lot of people unhappy, I'm sure. As Seife pointed out, the DVB subsystem is in a *sad* state since a *long* time. This move is just the one of the more visible consequences.
Well, DVB is still a current standard. If the kernel loses supports for it, that would be quite a loss in my opinion.
It removes one specific PCI chipset, not the whole DVB support. The successor PCI chipset, the SAA7134 is still supported by the upstream kernel. PCI systems are a niche. Home-build TV recording setups are a niche. The market is split into (at least?) two parts, DVB and ATSC. The hardware is only supported due to reverse-engineering, and this not only includes the interface chip, but also the typically separate tuner and digital decoder chipsets. There is probably not a single person left who actually understands these chipsets and accompanying drivers. I.e. there is lack of documentation, lack of interest, and lack of capability, and you need all 3 to actually maintain the driver(s). The hardware has moved on, and the current SoCs (be it for TV-Settop boxes or more generic ones with e.g. a few MIPI-CSI interfaces) have different requirements, and need different architectures and interfaces. Apparently DVB is still supported by the new interfaces, but there is just nobody who is capable and willing to port a driver for 25 year old hardware. Regards, Stefan