Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 14)

This week has seen progress on the GStreamer front: the segmentation fault that was a blocker when interfacing our libva backend with gstreamer-vaapi was investigated and understood. An associated bug was reported to the GNOME bug tracker, with all the gory details attached. Since the issue was in fact due to the assembly routine imported from libvdpau-sunxi smashing the malloc heap metadata, the bug report was closed. Using valgrind proved very useful for diagnosing the issue. Since we are not going to keep using the software-based untiling method through this assembly code, no time was spent on investigating and fixing the issue there.

The integration of changes in GStreamer for our case is also moving forward, with the submission of newer iterations of the related patches when requested. There are still issues left to fix with GStreamer, although things are looking better and better. Plenty of small bugs and mistakes have been identified and resolved in both our kernel driver and VAAPI backend in the process.

A new version of the request API has also been submitted for review and comments by Hans Verkuil. We have started rebasing our VPU driver on top of this new version and hope to send out this new version sometime next week.

We also started to look into H264, mostly by setting up a good test scenario for H264 (using the libvdpau-sunxi and an Allwinner kernel), making sure that it can actually decode H264 videos (which it does), and building similar setup with the mainline kernel and our libva implementation.

Stay tuned for more development updates related to Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux!

Author: Paul Kocialkowski

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

2 thoughts on “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 14)”

  1. This is a great approach, people! We are happy to hear this great news!

    I’ve got one question (if it is possible):
    Regarding kernel driver for mali400, would it be posible to use it to accelerate X-windows also or you are only focused in video acceleration? Maybe clarifying this could be a great aproach for people that are using boards based on these allwinner chips as Zero clients for VDI solutions.

    Thanks for your great work!

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