I am integrating a system composed of a Jetson AGX Orin Devkit, a ZED Link Quad Capture card, two ZED X and two GMSL2 cameras by Leopard Imaging (IMX490). I have no previous experience using GMSL. According to the Jetson Virtual Channel with GMSL Camera Framework, GMSL cameras need a deserializer and the ZED Link Card provides the IMX9296 Maxim Deserializer.
The ZED X cameras are working fine: ZED_Explorer, ZEDfu and other demos work perfectly with both cameras. However, I could not get any data from the LI camera. Running dmesg on Orin shows that a (unknown) camera was found in GMSL, but there is no /dev/video device for it. According to this documentation about driver support, NVIDIA JetPack 35.4.1 should support the IMX490-GMSL2 cameras.
So, I need to confirm if the ZED Link boards hardware can really work with GMSL2 cameras in general or if they are limited to ZED cameras only.
Other GMSL2 cameras can work with our capture card, but the drivers and device tree needs to be adapted for that, as each camera must be handled on the hardware/software transition.
On the ZED Link Quad, you have 2 deserializer (2x MAX96712), one for each 4-in-1 FAKRA port. One must be reserved for ZED-X (x2), the other one can be used for other cameras, but you will need to write the driver for the IMX490.
We do share the driver source code for the ZED-X and ZED-XOne cameras upon request. If you don’t have knowledge of writing kernel driver and device tree, you will need to ask a third party to do that, such as RidgeRun or even Leopard Imaging. Or you can try to do it yourself.
Another solution is to use our ZED-Xone Mono cameras who are directly compatible with our capture card. We don’t have a ZED-Xone with IMX490, but we have one with IMX678 inside (4K/HDR)
Thank you for your comprehensive answer, @obraun-sl.
If I understand correctly, Leopard Imaging has their IMX490 cameras working on their LI-JXAV-MIPI-ADPT board. However, the ZED Link Quad would require a different driver specific to that board, even though both boards use the MAX96712.
The LI-JXAV-MIPI-ADPT is just an adapter board that converts Samtec120pin connector of AGX (Xavier or Orin) to MIPI 30pins connector.
You then need a GMSL to MIPI capture card they have also, based on MAX9296.
The ZEDLink quad has 2x MAX96712, this is a deserializer they are also using for the E3653 board they have. So they probably also have a driver for IMX490 for this kind of deserializer.
Anyway, both will require some minor adjustments in the device tree (more than the driver itself).