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)”
This week’s progress in our VPU driver development effort was focused on two main tasks: submitting the sixth revision of the Cedrus VPU driver series to the mainline Linux kernel and starting the work on H265 decoding. The patch series for this new iteration of the driver was submitted on Wednesday and contains both functional … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 30)”
With a few weeks of delay, we are proud to announce the delivery of the main goals of our crowdfunding campaign dedicated at adding upstream Linux support for the Allwinner video decoding hardware. After several months of hard work by Bootlin engineer Maxime Ripard and intern Paul Kocialkowski, we now have a working demo of … Continue reading “Delivery of Allwinner VPU driver main goals”
This week was the occasion to send out version 5 of the Sunxi-Cedrus VPU driver, that uses version 16 of the media requests API. The API contains the necessary internal plumbing for tying specific metadata (exposed as v4l2 controls, that are structures of data set by userspace) about the current video frame to decode with … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 28)”
This week, significant time was dedicated to preparing a new revision of the Sunxi-Cedrus VPU kernel driver. This new version (that was started last week) based on version 15 of the media requests API brought about a number of challenges. First off, integrating the recently-tested VPU-side untiling of the destination buffers required a significant rewrite … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 27)”
This week on the video player integration side, we focused on the last remaining bits for Kodi integration with our pipeline, with support for the H3 SoC. Unlike its predecessors, the untiling is done directly by the VPU itself and not by the display engine, which makes the overall integration easier. Allwinner platforms that come … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 26)”
Back in September, we announced the availability of Mali userspace blobs that provide OpenGL acceleration on Allwinner platforms using the mainline Linux kernel. Back then, only the r6p2 version of the Mali blobs were available, with only the x11 and fbdev backends, and only for ARM 32 bits. Following the announcement we made last September, … Continue reading “More OpenGL binaries for the Mali support on Allwinner platforms with mainline Linux”
This week started off by submitting the fourth revision of the Sunxi-Cedrus VPU driver for review. Many improvements were squashed into this new version and the driver is closer than ever to being merged. With the media requests API in a nearly-ready state, things are really coming together on the kernel side. On the userspace … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 25)”
Integration with video players Following up on last week’s efforts on the video players integration front, Kodi remained our core focus. With a LibreELEC setup in place, it was possible to start tackling VAAPI integration. This was not such a straightforward task, since various assumptions were in place. For instance, it was assumed that VAAPI … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 24)”
