intel_cvs: Critical for IPU7 camera on Panther Lake - should be upstreamed to mainline

[jibsta210]

Summary

The intel_cvs driver from this repo is required to get the IPU7 camera working on Intel Panther Lake laptops (e.g., Dell XPS) running mainline kernels (tested on 7.0-rc7). Without it, the ACPI dependency chain for the OV08X40 sensor is never satisfied and the sensor I2C device is never created.

Details

On Dell Panther Lake with the Synaptics SVP7500 USBIO bridge, the camera sensor (OVTI08F4 / OV08X40) has an ACPI dependency on CVSS (INTC10E1), which is handled by intel_cvs. The dependency chain is:

LNK1 (sensor) → CVSS (intel_cvs) + DSC1 + VIC1 (i2c_usbio)

Without intel_cvs loaded, the kernel never creates the sensor's I2C device, and IPU7 ISYS reports "no sensors available."

Current state

• IPU7 ISYS is in-tree since kernel 6.17
• intel_cvs is not in-tree and must be built manually from this repo
• Must be built with CC=clang LLVM=1 on clang-built kernels (e.g., CachyOS)
• Must be rebuilt after every kernel update

Request

Please consider upstreaming intel_cvs to the mainline kernel. It's a critical piece of the IPU7 camera stack and currently the #1 blocker for getting webcams working on Panther Lake laptops running mainline or Arch-based distros.

Workaround

I've written a complete guide for getting the IPU7 camera working on CachyOS/Arch with the software ISP path:
https://www.reddit.com/r/cachyos/ (search for "IPU7 camera guide")

Environment

• Dell XPS with Intel Panther Lake
• CachyOS, kernel 7.0.0-rc7-2-cachyos-rc
• Sensor: OV08X40 (OVTI08F4)
• Bridge: Synaptics SVP7500 USBIO