Back in early 2018, Bootlin started a crowd-funding campaign to fund the development of an upstream Linux kernel driver for the VPU found in Allwinner processors. Thanks to the support from over 400 contributors, companies and individuals, we have been able to bring support for hardware-accelerated video decoding in the mainline Linux kernel for Allwinner … Continue reading “Wrapping up the Allwinner VPU crowdfunded Linux driver work”
Crowdfunding Campaign It has been over a year since we launched a crowdfunding campaign to fund the development of an upstream Linux kernel driver and userspace support for the Allwinner VPU. The funding campaign was a frank success, with over 400 backers contributing a total of over 30 k€ out of the 17,6 k€ set … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU campaign one-year anniversary”
The end of 2018 is approaching, which is the right time to provide an update on where we stand with the Allwinner VPU support in Linux. The promise of our Kickstarter campaign was to deliver all funded stretch goals by the end of 2018. As we’ll explain below, all the goals have been met, and … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux end of the year status update”
Since our previous update back in September, we continued the work to reach the goals set by our crowdfunding campaign and made a number of steps forward. First, we are happy to announce that the core of the Cedrus driver was approved by the linux-media maintainers! It followed the final version of the media request … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux November status update”
Even though the bulk of the development on the Allwinner VPU support is done, we are still working on completing the upstreaming of the kernel driver, and some progress has been made recently on this topic: On September 10, core Video4Linux developer Hans Verkuil sent a pull request to Video4Linux maintainer Mauro Carvalho Chehab to … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 37)”
The end of August has arrived, bringing an end to Paul’s engineering internship at Bootlin, focused on bringing mainline Linux support for the VPU found on Allwinner platforms. Over the past six months, we have worked hard to reach the goals announced in the project’s crowdfunding campaign and we were able to deliver most of … Continue reading “Final weekly status update for Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux (week 35)”
This week has seen great advancements in H265 support, following up on the work conducted during the past weeks. The first item to debug was support for bi-directional predictive frames (AKA B frames) which was broken last week. This required some adaptation in our standalone test tool v4l2-request-test in order to display the decoded frames … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 34)”
The first task that was tackled this week was solving the bit offset issue encountered last week. We found out that ffmpeg provides VAAPI with a byte-aligned value after rounding it up from an internal offset it keeps in bits. When trying to use the internal value in bits, our VPU would succeed at decoding … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 33)”
This week started with the preparation of a new revision of the Cedrus VPU driver, after significant feedback was received on the version posted two weeks ago. Thanks to the careful testing carried out by community member Jernej Škrabec, a number of decoding issues were discovered in version 6 of the driver. This includes issues … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 32)”
Following on last week’s progress, this week was also focused on bringing the required plumbing for H265 support in our video decoding pipeline. Thanks to register dumps obtained last week from libvdpau-sunxi, it was possible to quickly hack together support for decoding a single intra frame (with no dependency on any other frame), by replaying … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 31)”
