Roadmap of future IVTV development

From IVTV

Hans Verkuil is one of the IVTV developers and is currently working on integrating IVTV into the Linux kernel. Here's what he had to say about the future of IVTV development, as of 2 Jan 2006:

Hi all,

Given the furious pace of development in the v4l-dvb repository, which will make it ever harder to keep compatibility as an out-of-tree driver I've decided on the following schedule:

ivtv-0.4 will support up to kernel 2.6.15 (will probably appear very soon). 2.6.16 will almost certainly no longer be supported by the 0.4 series.

ivtv-0.5 currently tracks the v4l-dvb development very closely indeed. Part of the changes I make go straight into the v4l-dvb repo, and the first (if small) steps to integrating ivtv are already made. Unfortunately things went so fast that ivtv-0.5 no longer works with the 2.6.15 kernel. That's my fault, I should have branched ivtv-0.5 for the 2.6.15 kernel. So my plan is that for the 2.6.16 kernel I will at some point make an ivtv-0.6 branch that will follow 2.6.16 and result in an ivtv-0.6.0 release that works with 2.6.16 (version numbers match nicely :-)

Development for 2.6.17 will continue in the ivtv-0.7 series. I will probably release an ivtv-0.7.0 but my hope is that ivtv-0.8.0 will not appear anymore but that by that time ivtv will be part of the 2.6.18 kernel. No guarantees, though.

So ivtv-0.4.x will be good up to and including 2.6.15, after that use ivtv-0.6.x for 2.6.16, and ivtv-0.7.x for 2.6.17.

When 2.6.15 is released I intend to make an ivtv-0.4.2 release shortly afterwards.

To give an indication of what we can look forward to: the cx23416 is used also by the pvrusb2 project and the blackbird dvb designs. The idea is to make a cx2341x module that contains the high level handling of the cx2341x while the actual communication to the chip is handled by a backend (pci, usb, blackbird). That way the duplication of code is limited. As a first step the cx2341x firmware documentation from ivtv is already added to the v4l-dvb documentation as is a cx2341x.h header with the firmware API commands. I'm also working on cleaning up and improving the msp3400.c module (used by the PVR250/350 and other cards) which was a bit of a mess. The saa7115.c (originating from ivtv) will be extended with support for the saa7113 and possibly also for the saa7110 and saa7111.

The new merged paken modules will also be added to the v4l-dvb repository. The main bottleneck for a module like the wm8739 is that the i2c kernel handling is missing some functionality which might appear in 2.6.16, but that is not certain. Others need more cleanup.

And the cleanup process for ivtv is also starting. So expect lots of changes.

Happy New Year!

       Hans