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)”
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)”
On the players integration side, the goals for this week covered Kodi support for our beloved Allwinner platforms (of course, with upstream). But first, a few words as a follow-up to last week’s work on the MB32 untiling GPU shader. A specific commit related to texture uploading on the Mali400 was spotted in the MER … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 23)”
Integration with video players The work conducted this week on the video output side was focused on writing a shader for untiling the MB32 NV12-based format used by the VPU to output frames. This brought various challenges, some of which are presented below. Since GLES and EGL are generic APIs that are not tied to … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 22)”
This week’s effort was focused on getting VLC to accelerate its video output using the Mali proprietary blobs. More specifically, two distinct interfaces are involved: EGL, that allows interacting with the platform’s windowing system (in our case, X11) and GLES, that is in charge of the rendering operations. While VLC already had support for both … Continue reading “Allwinner VPU support in mainline Linux status update (week 21)”
