Comment by anewhnaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anewhnaccount2 | Hacker News Reader

Reading between the lines here, the situation seems to be a little like the softmodem situation, which was also a major pain for Linux support. The abstraction previously given in hardware has been split into software/hardware to save on hardware costs, but now they refuse to open source the software.

As for the provided user-space software, it's not clear why this is happening. As long as kernel modules keep to the allowed interfaces, (and not the GPL-only internal interfaces) they can be closed source. Is it a case of too much caution from the vendors (after all -- NVidia have closed source drivers)? Is this supposed to be more forward compatible? Is it possible to have a higher performance (zero copy?) user-space exposed abstraction for this kind of video processing?

It exactly reminded me of softmodems, except just maybe here there's room for innovation. Apparently getting the raw sensor data allows you to do clever AI-based enhancements to the image. A bit different from softmodems because there you were always limited by what the other end of the phone line (ie. your ISP) would accept so you couldn't invent a better encoding system.

These are the inverse of soft modems though. Those were just a PHY layer with the software driver doing all the DSP work. Softmodems removed DSP hardware. Modern image sensors have more smarts than just a CMOS sensor.

quick add of onboard Unmanned Aerial Vehicle cameras and sensors, in the other direction. Being without precedent, there is no pattern of evolution in the consumer space as with soft-modems, but.. next-gen UAVs can benefit from onboard filters (and more?) however, the temptation to make proprietary, definitely black-box, processing chains is huge. Precisely for the purpose of manipulating the output or censoring the output, it turns out. Hard to deal with in the markets since first-mover and contract-wielding advantages, are not fake. unlike the photos and video being generated?

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