Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux November 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 API (the required piece of media framework plumbing necessary for our driver).

Both the API and our driver were merged in time for Linux 4.20, that is currently at the release candidate stage and will be released in a few weeks. The core of the Cedrus driver that is now in Linus’ tree supports hardware-accelerated video decoding for the MPEG-2 codec. We have even already seen contributions from the community, including minor fixes and improvements!

We have also been following-up on the other features covered by our crowdfunding campaign and made good progress on bringing them forward:

  • The series bringing H.264 decoding to our driver was updated for a second revision on November 15, rebased atop the upcoming Linux release and including a number of fixes as well as documentation;
  • H.265 decoding support followed with a second version sent on November 23, based on the updated H.264 series and bringing various minor improvements over the first iteration;
  • The patch series for the display engine DRM driver that adds support for the tiled YUV format used by the VPU was also updated, significantly reworked and submitted again on November 23;
  • Finally, we submitted a patch series adding support for the A64 and H5 Allwinner SoCs in the Cedrus VPU driver on November 15.
A64 and H5 boards provided by our sponsors Olimex and Libretech, now supported in Cedrus

With these patch series well on their way, we are closer than ever to delivering the remaining goals of the crowdfunding campaign!

Author: Paul Kocialkowski

Paul is a kernel and embedded Linux engineer at Bootlin, which he joined in 2018. See More details...

5 thoughts on “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux November status update”

      1. Hi,
        Allwinner A10 is supported in general, but the dts changes have not been not merged in mainline still. They are also not part of the recently sent patchset. To add A10 support, video engine nodes and sram c node have to be added like this: https://github.com/rellla/linux-cedrus/commits/cedrus/4.19/drm-rebased-a10-h265
        Also, to get a proper drm integration, this http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1811.2/07115.html patchset has to be extended with support for the sun4i_frontend compatible like it is done here https://github.com/rellla/linux-cedrus/commits/cedrus/4.19/drm-rebased-a10 . Once that is done, cedrus will work on A10 devices 🙂

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