1. Media Subsystem Profile

1.1. Overview

The Linux Media Community (aka: the LinuxTV Community) is formed of developers working on Linux Kernel Media Subsystem, together with users who also play an important role in testing the code.

The Media Subsystem has code to support a wide variety of media-related devices: stream capture, analog and digital TV streams, cameras, video codecs, video processing (resizers, etc.), radio, remote controllers, HDMI CEC and media pipeline control.

The Media Subsystem consists of the following directories in the kernel tree:

  • drivers/media

  • drivers/staging/media

  • include/media

  • Documentation/devicetree/bindings/media/[1]

  • Documentation/admin-guide/media

  • Documentation/driver-api/media

  • Documentation/userspace-api/media

Both media userspace and Kernel APIs are documented and the documentation must be kept in sync with the API changes. It means that all patches that add new features to the subsystem must also bring changes to the corresponding API documentation.

A small subsystem will typically consist of driver maintainers (as listed in the MAINTAINERS file) and one or two subsystem maintainers who merge the patches when ready, maintain the subsystem core code and make the pull requests to Linus. Due to the size and wide scope of the Media Subsystem this does not scale and more maintainance layers are needed.

1.2. Media Maintainers

The media subsystem has three layers of media maintainers:

  • Media Maintainer:

    Responsible for a group of drivers within the Media Subsystem. Typically these are all drivers that have something in common, e.g. codec drivers or drivers from the same vendor. Media Maintainers provide feedback if the patches are not following the subsystem rules, or are not using the media kernel or userspace APIs correctly, or have poor code quality. They also keep patchwork up to date, decide when patches are ready for merging, and create Pull Requests for the Media Subsystem Maintainers to merge.

    A Media Maintainer is not just someone who is capable of creating code, but someone who has demonstrated their ability to collaborate with the team, get the most knowledgeable people to review code, contribute high-quality code, and follow through to fix issues (in code or tests).

  • Media Core Maintainer:

    Media Maintainers who are also responsible for one or more media core frameworks.

    Core framework changes are done via consensus between the relevant Media Core Maintainers. Media Maintainers may include core framework changes in their Pull Requests if they are signed off by the relevant Media Core Maintainers.

  • Media Subsystem Maintainers:

    Responsible for the subsystem as a whole, with access to the entire subsystem. Responsible for merging Pull Requests from other Media Maintainers.

    Userspace API/ABI changes are done via consensus between Media Subsystem Maintainers[2]. Media (Core) Maintainers may include API/ABI changes in their Pull Requests if they are signed off by the all Media Subsystem Maintainers.

All Media Maintainers shall explicitly agree with the Kernel development process as described at Documentation/process/index.rst and to the Kernel development rules inside the Kernel documentation, including its code of conduct.

All Media Maintainers shall ensure that patchwork will reflect the current status, e.g. patches shall be delegated to the Media Maintainer who is handling them and the patch status shall be updated according to these rules:

  • Under Review: Used if the patch requires a second opinion or when it is part of a pull request;

  • Accepted: Once a patch is merged in the multi-committer tree.

  • Superseded: There is a newer version of the patch posted to the mailing list.

  • Duplicated: There was another patch doing the same thing from someone else that was accepted.

  • Not Applicable: Use for patch series that are not merged at media.git tree (e.g. drm, dmabuf, upstream merge, etc.) but were cross-posted to the linux-media mailing list.

If the Media Maintainer decides not to accept a patch, then reply by email to the patch authors, explaining why it is not accepted, and patchwork shall be updated accordingly with either:

  • Changes Requested: if a new revision was requested;

  • Rejected: if the proposed change is not acceptable at all.

Note

Patchwork supports a couple of clients to help semi-automating status updates via its REST interface:

https://patchwork.readthedocs.io/en/latest/usage/clients/

Media Maintainers are reachable via the #linux-media IRC channel at OFTC.

1.3. Becoming a Media Maintainer

The most important aspect of volunteering to be a Media Maintainer is that you have demonstrated the ability to give good code reviews. So we are looking for whether or not we think you will be good at doing that.

As such, potential maintainers must earn enough credibility and trust from the Linux Media Community. To do that, developers shall be familiar with the open source model and have been active in the Linux Kernel community for some time, and, in particular, in the media subsystem.

In addition to actually making the code changes, you are basically demonstrating your:

  • commitment to the project;

  • ability to collaborate with the team and communicate well;

  • understand of how upstream and the Linux Media Community work (policies, processes for testing, code review, ...)

  • reasonable knowledge about:

    • the Kernel development process: Documentation/process/index.rst

    • the Media development profile: Documentation/driver-api/media/maintainer-entry-profile.rst

  • understanding of the projects’ code base and coding style;

  • ability to provide feedback to the patch authors;

  • ability to judge when a patch might be ready for review and to submit;

  • ability to write good code (last but certainly not least).

Developers that desire to become maintainers are encouraged to participate at the yearly Linux Media Summit, typically co-located with a Linux related conference. These summits will be announced at the linux-media mailing list.

If you are doing such tasks and have become a valued developer, an existing Media Maintainer can nominate you to the Media Subsystem Maintainers.

The ultimate responsibility for accepting a nominated maintainer is up to the subsystem’s maintainers. The nominated maintainer must have earned a trust relationship with all Media Subsystem Maintainers, as, by becoming Media Maintainer, you will take over part of their maintenance tasks.

1.4. Media Committers

Experienced and trusted Media (Core) Maintainers may be granted commit rights which allow them to directly push patches to the media development tree instead of posting a Pull Request for the Media Subsystem Maintainers. This helps offloading some of the work of the Media Subsystem Maintainers.

More details about Media Committers’ roles and responsibilities can be found here: Media Committers.

1.5. Media development tree

The main development tree used by the media subsystem is hosted at gitlab.freedesktop.org. LinuxTV.org hosts news about the subsystem, wiki pages and a patchwork instance where we track patches though their lifetime.

The main tree used by media developers is at:

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/linux-media/media-committers.git

Please note that this tree can be rebased, although only as a last resort.

1.5.1. Media development workflow

All changes for the media subsystem shall be sent first as e-mails to the media mailing list, following the process documented at Documentation/process/index.rst.

It means that patches shall be submitted as plain text only via e-mail to linux-media@vger.kernel.org (aka: LMML). While subscription is not mandatory, you can find details about how to subscribe to it and to see its archives at:

Emails with HTML will be automatically rejected by the mail server.

It could be wise to also copy the Media Maintainer(s). You should use scripts/get_maintainers.pl to identify whom else needs to be copied. Please always copy driver’s authors and maintainers.

To minimize the chance of merge conflicts for your patch series, and make easier to backport patches to stable Kernels, we recommend that you use the following baseline for your patch series:

  1. Features for the next mainline release:

    • baseline shall be the media-committers.git next branch;

  2. Bug fixes for the next mainline release:

    • baseline shall be the media-committers.git next branch. If the changes depend on a fix from the media-committers.git fixes branch, then you can use that as baseline.

  3. Bug fixes for the current mainline release (-rcX):

    • baseline shall be the latest mainline -rcX release or the media-committers.git fixes branch if changes depend on a mainline fix that is not yet merged;

Note

See https://www.kernel.org/category/releases.html for an overview about Kernel release types.

Patches with fixes shall have:

  • a Fixes: tag pointing to the first commit that introduced the bug;

  • when applicable, a Cc: stable@vger.kernel.org.

Patches that were fixing bugs publicly reported by someone at the linux-media@vger.kernel.org mailing list shall have:

  • a Reported-by: tag immediately followed by a Closes: tag.

Patches that change API shall update documentation accordingly at the same patch series.

See Documentation/process/index.rst for more details about e-mail submission.

Once a patch is submitted, it may follow either one of the following workflows:

  1. Media Maintainers’ workflow: Media Maintainers post the PRs, which are handled by the Media Subsystem Maintainers:

    +-------+   +------------+   +------+   +-------+   +----------------------------+
|e-mail |-->|picked up by|-->|code  |-->|pull   |-->|Subsystem Maintainers merge |
|to LMML|   |patchwork   |   |review|   |request|   |in media-committers.git     |
+-------+   +------------+   +------+   +-------+   +----------------------------+

    For this workflow, pull requests are generated by Media Maintainers. If you are not a Media Maintainer, then please don’t submit pull requests, as they will not be processed.

  2. Media Committers’ workflow: patches are handled by Media Maintainers with commit rights:

    +-------+   +------------+   +------+   +--------------------------+
|e-mail |-->|picked up by|-->|code  |-->|Media Committers merge in |
|to LMML|   |patchwork   |   |review|   |media-committers.git      |
+-------+   +------------+   +------+   +--------------------------+

When patches are picked up by patchwork and when merged at media-committers, Media CI bots will check for errors and may provide e-mail feedback about patch problems. When this happens, the patch submitter must fix them or explain why the errors are false positives.

Patches will only be moved to the next stage in these two workflows if they pass on Media CI or if there are false-positives in the Media CI reports.

For both workflows, all patches shall be properly reviewed at linux-media@vger.kernel.org (LMML) before being merged in media-committers.git. Media patches will be reviewed in a timely manner by the maintainers and reviewers as listed in the MAINTAINERS file.

Media Maintainers shall request reviews from other Media Maintainers and developers where applicable, i.e. because those developers have more knowledge about some areas that are changed by a patch.

There shall be no open issues or unresolved or conflicting feedback from anyone. Clear them up first. Defer to the Media Subsystem Maintainers if needed.

1.5.2. Failures during e-mail submission

Media’s workflow is heavily based on Patchwork, meaning that, once a patch is submitted, the e-mail will first be accepted by the mailing list server, and, after a while, it should appear at:

If it doesn’t automatically appear there after some time [3], then probably something went wrong on your submission. Please check if the email is in plain text[4] only and if your emailer is not mangling whitespaces before complaining or submitting them again.

To troubleshoot problems, you should first check if the mailing list server has accepted your patch, by looking at:

If the patch is there and not at patchwork, it is likely that your e-mailer mangled the patch. Patchwork internally has logic that checks if the received e-mail contains a valid patch. Any whitespace and new line breakages mangling the patch won’t be recognized by patchwork, thus such patch will be rejected.

1.5.3. Authentication for pull and merge requests

The authenticity of developers submitting pull requests and merge requests shall be validated by using PGP signing at some moment. See: kernel_org_trust_repository.

With the pull request workflow, pull requests shall use PGP-signed tags.

With the committers’ workflow, this is ensured at the time merge request rights will be granted to the gitlab instance used by the media-committers.git tree, after receiving the e-mail documented in Media Committer’s agreement.

For more details about PGP sign, please read Documentation/process/maintainer-pgp-guide.rst.

1.6. Maintaining media maintainer status

See Maintaining media maintainer or committer status.

1.7. List of Media Maintainers

The Media Subsystem Maintainers are:
The Media Core Maintainers are:
The Media Maintainers are:

1.8. Submit Checklist Addendum

Patches that change the Open Firmware/Device Tree bindings must be reviewed by the Device Tree maintainers. So, DT maintainers should be Cc:ed when those are submitted via devicetree@vger.kernel.org mailing list.

There is a set of compliance tools at https://git.linuxtv.org/v4l-utils.git/ that should be used in order to check if the drivers are properly implementing the media APIs:

Type

Utility

V4L2 drivers[5]

v4l2-compliance

V4L2 virtual drivers

contrib/test/test-media

CEC drivers

cec-compliance

Those tests need to pass before the patches go upstream.

Also, please notice that we build the Kernel with:

make CF=-D__CHECK_ENDIAN__ CONFIG_DEBUG_SECTION_MISMATCH=y C=1 W=1 CHECK=check_script

Where the check script is:

#!/bin/bash
/devel/smatch/smatch -p=kernel $@ >&2
/devel/sparse/sparse $@ >&2

Be sure to not introduce new warnings on your patches without a very good reason.

Please see Media development workflow for e-mail submission rules.

1.8.1. Style Cleanup Patches

Style cleanups are welcome when they come together with other changes at the files where the style changes will affect.

We may accept pure standalone style cleanups, but they should ideally be one patch for the whole subsystem (if the cleanup is low volume), or at least be grouped per directory. So, for example, if you’re doing a big cleanup change set at drivers under drivers/media, please send a single patch for all drivers under drivers/media/pci, another one for drivers/media/usb and so on.

1.8.2. Coding Style Addendum

Media development uses checkpatch.pl on strict mode to verify the code style, e.g.:

$ ./scripts/checkpatch.pl --strict --max-line-length=80

In principle, patches should follow the coding style rules, but exceptions are allowed if there are good reasons. On such case, maintainers and reviewers may question about the rationale for not addressing the checkpatch.pl.

Please notice that the goal here is to improve code readability. On a few cases, checkpatch.pl may actually point to something that would look worse. So, you should use good sense.

Note that addressing one checkpatch.pl issue (of any kind) alone may lead to having longer lines than 80 characters per line. While this is not strictly prohibited, efforts should be made towards staying within 80 characters per line. This could include using re-factoring code that leads to less indentation, shorter variable or function names and last but not least, simply wrapping the lines.

In particular, we accept lines with more than 80 columns:

  • on strings, as they shouldn’t be broken due to line length limits;

  • when a function or variable name need to have a big identifier name, which keeps hard to honor the 80 columns limit;

  • on arithmetic expressions, when breaking lines makes them harder to read;

  • when they avoid a line to end with an open parenthesis or an open bracket.

1.9. Key Cycle Dates

New submissions can be sent at any time, but if they are intended to hit the next merge window they should be sent before -rc5, and ideally stabilized in the linux-media branch by -rc6.

1.10. Review Cadence

Provided that your patch has landed in https://patchwork.linuxtv.org, it should be sooner or later handled, so you don’t need to re-submit a patch.

Except for important bug fixes, we don’t usually add new patches to the development tree between -rc6 and the next -rc1.

Please notice that the media subsystem is a high traffic one, so it could take a while for us to be able to review your patches. Feel free to ping if you don’t get a feedback in a couple of weeks or to ask other developers to publicly add Reviewed-by: and, more importantly, Tested-by: tags.

Please note that we expect a detailed description for Tested-by:, identifying what boards were used at the test and what it was tested.