As announced last week, the second revision of the Sunxi-Cedrus driver patchset was submitted for review earlier this week. While this new revision is based on the latest version of the request API, it also includes several fixes for corner-cases of this new API, especially to use it in the context of a M2M driver. Regarding the driver itself, significant reworks were carried out (including both functional and cosmetic changes) and the driver is now more stable. It was tested on the A33 and A20 so far and works nicely on both.
The standalone tool that was developed for testing the driver, called cedrus-frame-test, has seen various improvements that allow reliably testing the Sunxi-Cedrus driver. The tool is now in a state where it can be used nicely from the command line and includes the first few frames of our reference Big Buck Bunny MPEG2 video. It also implements timestamping to have a clear idea of how long frame decoding and frame display take. A target number of frames per seconds can also be set, with error messages printed when the target fps could not be met. Finally, a dummy libVA backend was written to easily dump slices and frame metadata from videos: libva-dump.
Instructions to setup the kernel driver as well as cedrus-frame-test from our trees will be made available on the linux-sunxi wiki page dedicated to Sunxi-Cedrus very soon.
At this point, the time spent decoding each video frame is rather satisfying (around 5 ms as a ballpark figure) for our 854×480 demo video. We are still doing a hard copy of each frame to feed it to the display driver: that’s where the current bottleneck is. There is work left to be done in that area, first by implementing DMAbuf and also by using proper page flipping in cedrus-frame-test. We are also hitting a display issue with 4.16 on the A20, although that problem might have been fixed in 4.17 already.
Next week will be focused on (finally) adding DMAbuf support and getting libVA in shape to work with the new Sunxi-Cedrus kernel driver under VLC and GStreamer. The final patch of the first GStreamer adaptation series submitted some weeks ago was recently merged in GStreamer.
I’m very impressed by the pace of the progress 🙂 hoping that all my Allwinner stuff soon will see a new life.
Thanks to bootlin and the kickstarters!
P.S. will replicant run on sunxi mainline anytime in the future? Seems more and more like a match made in heaven (by the community).
The Cedrus frame looks amazing. It’s amazing to see how screens overtime have been able to decrease the latency definition. I hope you solve that bottleneck soon, I can’t wait to see what you come out with next.