VP9 with Venus driver fails while H264 / H265 works

[HeyMeco]

Description

Trying to playback VP9 in browsers (chromium / firefox) or MPV (ffmpeg) with V4L2M2M-Copy always leads to crashes lile this:

From dmesg:

[Oct19 20:26] qcom-venus aa00000.video-codec: no valid instance(pkt session_id:ff, pkt:21001)
[  +0.000033] qcom-venus-decoder aa00000.video-codec:video-decoder: dec: event session error 0
[  +0.008799] qcom-venus aa00000.video-codec: SFR message from FW: QC_IMAGE_VERSION_STRING=video-firmware.1.0-ed457c183307eff1737608763ca0f23656c95b53 Err_Fatal - C:/sagar/codebase/video_firmware.1.0/video-fw/venus_proc/venus/decoders/vpx/src/vpx_decoder.c:5653:72eee
[  +1.349165] qcom-venus aa00000.video-codec: System error has occurred, recovery failed to init HFI
[  +1.215865] qcom-venus aa00000.video-codec: System error has occurred, recovery failed to init HFI
[  +0.056584] qcom-venus aa00000.video-codec: system error has occurred (recovered)

Seems to be related to the firmware in upstream linux.

Environment

Tested with 6.18 but also happened with prior versions on QCS6490

[dikshita-agarwal]

Hi @HeyMeco
Could you please let me know from where you picked the firmware binary while testing this?
Could you pls share the link to firmware binaries being used?

Thanks,
Dikshita

[HeyMeco]

Hello @dikshita-agarwal

Thanks for taking a look at this too. I had used the latest copy of firmware from https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/ (tree/qcom/vpu) which only shows one log entry for vpu20_p1_gen2.mbn and that it was sent on 2025-04-21 by yourself ^^.

Context at armbian we have a meta package called armbian-firmware-full which just gets all the firmware's from upstream.

Replication

The easiest way to replicate this is (under Debian Bookworm or Trixie) to use

• mpv with v4l2m2m (not sure if it was --hwdec v4l2m2m-copy or without the -copy but only one worked)

or where it is very noticable since the youtube page is full of vp9 hover previews:

• chromium with these flags to enable VPU support:

# Use ozone wayland for vpu decoding
export CHROMIUM_FLAGS="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --ozone-platform-hint=wayland"

# Enable V4L2 decoding and  NV12 direct rendering
export CHROMIUM_FLAGS="$CHROMIUM_FLAGS --enable-features=AcceleratedVideoDecoder,AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxGL,AcceleratedVideoDecodeLinuxZeroCopyGL"

[dikshita-agarwal]

I think there is some confusion here.
the logs says QC_IMAGE_VERSION_STRING=video-firmware.1.0-ed457c183307eff1737608763ca0f23656c95b53
which points to https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/tree/qcom/vpu/vpu20_p1.mbn

could you pls recheck.

Also which driver you are using for your testing, base or overlay?

[HeyMeco]

@dikshita-agarwal I'm not doing anything special with the driver besides using the upstream kernel that includes it. Could it be that QCS6490 device-tree or the driver doesn't point to the v2 firmware (which seems to only say for QCM6490 in the log)?

vpu20_p1_gen2.mbn: QC_IMAGE_VERSION_STRING=video-firmware.2.4.2-d7a3d5386743efb16b828e08695bea7722cafadd
Log:

2025-04-21 52025-04-21: qcom: vpu: add video firmware binary for qcm6490

vpu20_p1.mbn: QC_IMAGE_VERSION_STRING=video-firmware.1.0-ed457c183307eff1737608763ca0f23656c95b53
Log:

2024-11-13: qcom: update venus firmware file for SC7280 
2024-08-09: qcom: update path for video firmware for vpu-1/2/3.0

[HeyMeco]

When trying to use the v2 firmware with QCS6490 it cannot even load the firmware:

[    3.646835] qcom-venus aa00000.video-codec: non legacy binding
[    3.675950] qcom-venus aa00000.video-codec: fail to load video firmware
[    3.686567] qcom-venus aa00000.video-codec: probe with driver qcom-venus failed with error -22

[HeyMeco]

Update here: https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2622656e-9abd-4407-b1fa-228da9959d60@oss.qualcomm.com/T/#u

[dikshita-agarwal]

Could you pls confirm this change fixes the issue for you