Over the last few years, and most recently with the support for the C.H.I.P platform, Bootlin has been heavily involved in initiating and improving the support in the mainline Linux kernel for the Allwinner ARM processors. As of today, a large number of hardware features of the Allwinner processors, especially the older ones such as the A10 or the A13 used in the CHIP, are usable with the mainline Linux kernel, including complex functionality such as display support and 3D acceleration. However, one feature that was still lacking is proper support for the Video Processing Unit (VPU) that allows to accelerate in hardware the decoding and encoding of popular video formats.
During the past two months, Florent Revest, a 19 year old intern at Bootlin worked on a mainline solution for this Video Processing Unit. His work followed the reverse engineering effort of the Cedrus project, and this topic was also listed as a High Priority Reverse Engineering Project by the FSF.
The internship resulted in a new sunxi-cedrus driver, a Video4Linux memory-to-memory decoder kernel driver and a corresponding VA-API backend, which allows numerous userspace applications to use the decoding capabilities. Both projects have both been published on Github:
Currently, the combination of the kernel driver and VA-API backend supports MPEG2 and MPEG4 decoding only. There is for the moment no support for encoding, and no support for H264, though we believe support for both aspects can be added within the architecture of the existing driver and VA-API backend.
A first RFC patchset of the kernel driver has been sent to the linux-media mailing list, and a complete documentation providing installation information and architecture details has been written on the linux-sunxi’s wiki.
Here is a video of VLC playing a MPEG2 demo video on top of this stack on the Next Thing’s C.H.I.P:
Most excellent! Thanks for the efforts!
My hero! Thanks so much, can’t wait for H.264 decoding support!
Great work!
Wow, great vision on your part to be able to see this possibility. You will get my money.
Can you share the porting documentations? I mean the data struct and algorythm according to the hardware registers
Does anyone know where to get a Linux SD bootable image for the Allwinner R16 board?