Xalius Posted February 2, 2018 Posted February 2, 2018 Free Electrons (now Bootlin ;/) have launched a Kickstarter to get the work on the Allwinner VPU (Video Processing Unit) off the ground again... https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bootlin/allwinner-vpu-support-in-the-official-linux-kernel 3
Tido Posted February 2, 2018 Posted February 2, 2018 (edited) Free Electrons is changing to a new name, in the context of a trademark dispute. The weird thing about this campaign - you support ALLWINNER, while ALLWINNER actually should pay Bootlin to do this for them. Especially people using OSMC OpenELEC LibreELEC Kodi - should be strong supporter of this Kickstarter ... unless you use a different SoC. Edited February 2, 2018 by Tido some more to say :-) 2
zador.blood.stained Posted February 2, 2018 Posted February 2, 2018 59 minutes ago, Tido said: The weird thing about this campaign - you support ALLWINNER, while ALLWINNER actually should pay Bootlin to do this for them. AW doesn't care as long as their Android BSPs work, regardless of GPL status and the number of blobs. Regarding whether AW cares about mainline stuff and open-source: https://irclog.whitequark.org/linux-sunxi/2018-02-01#21205164
Tido Posted February 2, 2018 Posted February 2, 2018 beating a dead horse is not going to get you anywhere. I rather support Amlogic or Rockchip 1
jernej Posted February 3, 2018 Posted February 3, 2018 9 hours ago, zador.blood.stained said: AW doesn't care as long as their Android BSPs work, regardless of GPL status and the number of blobs. Regarding whether AW cares about mainline stuff and open-source: https://irclog.whitequark.org/linux-sunxi/2018-02-01#21205164 While they still don't cooperate with open source community as good as Rockchip, they at least are more cooperative. I asked for HDMI/DE2/DE3 documents and received all of them. Someone else asked about AC200 doc and also receive it. Or better said, they were uploaded to linux-sunxi.org. I would say that is a very good improvement. 3
zador.blood.stained Posted February 3, 2018 Posted February 3, 2018 4 hours ago, jernej said: I would say that is a very good improvement. Yes, but in a long run this may not be enough, there are too many sunxi SoCs and not that many involved developers to get mainlining efforts close to Amlogic or Rockchip levels, and any documentation issue only makes it worse, especially for essentials like DRAM code. 2
jernej Posted February 3, 2018 Posted February 3, 2018 1 hour ago, zador.blood.stained said: there are too many sunxi SoCs Fortunately, periphery on them is mostly the same or for iteration better, so at least basic support is quickly added. But yes, libdram situation is very irritating.
zador.blood.stained Posted February 3, 2018 Posted February 3, 2018 24 minutes ago, jernej said: better "better" still means "different", just look at the GPADC/THS situation - newer SoCs have "better" versions but it took quite some time to settle the argument between developers and maintainers how the new and existing code needs to be refactored to fit into mainline, and Icenowy already noped out of mainlining H3/H5/A64 THS.
guidol Posted February 3, 2018 Posted February 3, 2018 Great Bootlin News from https://twitter.com/bootlincom : Quote Wow, we're impressed! Our @kickstarter campaign launch just yesterday has already hit its main goal (17600 EUR) ! Many, many, many thanks to all our backers, individuals and companies. We are really happy to see that crowdfunding Linux kernel upstream development has been well received! Developing and upstreaming complete Linux support for the Allwinner VPU, for hardware accelerated video decoding and encoding. A Stretch Goal was is (Requires 4400 EUR in addition to our main goal): Supporting the newer Allwinner SoCs, such as the H3, H5 and A64. At this time they have: 22.013 US$ = +13$ over the stretch-goal
Tido Posted February 3, 2018 Posted February 3, 2018 I hope and guess they have a contract in place with ALLWINNER, so they get the documentation.
jernej Posted February 3, 2018 Posted February 3, 2018 43 minutes ago, guidol said: A Stretch Goal was (Requires 4400 EUR in addition to our main goal): Supporting the newer Allwinner SoCs, such as the H3, H5 and A64. Are you sure you're not mixing USD and EUR? Kickstarter currently shows 17668 EUR. 5 minutes ago, Tido said: I hope and guess they have a contract in place with ALLWINNER, so they get the documentation. Doubtful, but there's a lot of knowledge already in form of registers description on wiki and working prototypes like libvdpau-sunxi and sunxi-cedrus (v4l2 driver they are finishing it now).
guidol Posted February 3, 2018 Posted February 3, 2018 21 minutes ago, jernej said: Are you sure you're not mixing USD and EUR? Kickstarter currently shows 17668 EUR. Yes you catched me - as I did read - I think there was only one currency at the page They "only" have 22.013USD and not 22.000EUR - so the stretch goal isnt reached. BUT this was the first day - there will be 43 more to spend....
hojnikb Posted February 3, 2018 Posted February 3, 2018 This is great news! Hopefully they can reach their goal and make it happen.
manuti Posted February 5, 2018 Posted February 5, 2018 Founded. I like to bet for death horses!And the First additional stretch goal is reached 22.943 € Monday, February 5. 1
tkaiser Posted February 5, 2018 Posted February 5, 2018 32 minutes ago, manuti said: And the stretch goal is reached The first stretch goal is reached (that was the 'try to cover not only horribly outdated SoCs from half a decade ago but also some of the just outdated ones'). Two stretch goals are yet open and they estimate the same amount of work/money needed (another 22 man days or 22,000€ in total) 1
Tido Posted February 5, 2018 Posted February 5, 2018 30 minutes ago, tkaiser said: (another 22 man days or 22,000€ in total) it is not about hiring a contractor - both internals, Maxime Ripard, working for Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) as an embedded Linux engineer since 2011. Paul Kocialkowski, who will be working as an intern at Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) starting March 2018.
Baal Posted March 6, 2018 Posted March 6, 2018 May be someone interested. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/bootlin/allwinner-vpu-support-in-the-official-linux-kernel First stretch goal - H3/H5 support already reached. May be we'll finally have proper video support
chwe Posted March 6, 2018 Posted March 6, 2018 (edited) By using this: you'll find this: which has even the same title than your tread... Edited March 7, 2018 by zador.blood.stained Merged
Xalius Posted March 15, 2018 Author Posted March 15, 2018 Three days left, 2k left to reach the H.265 decoding stretch goal...
hojnikb Posted March 15, 2018 Posted March 15, 2018 Even if they get h264 decoding working, its going to be a huge win for allwinner community. Having a working h265 isn't really all that useful to be honest, since the common chips (H3,H5 etc) only support 8 bit decoding, while most media i came across is encoded for 10 bit. h264 media on the other hand is still widely available, so having mainline support would be awesome. Now if someone would get this working under chrome or firefox, that would be a different ballgame 1
Maor545 Posted March 19, 2018 Posted March 19, 2018 Now I hope, those guys will deliver, what they have promised.
Tido Posted March 19, 2018 Posted March 19, 2018 places to watch: a nice table per SoC - http://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus more details - http://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus
Tido Posted March 31, 2018 Posted March 31, 2018 to follow this topic, there is an update on their blog: https://bootlin.com/blog/allwinner-vpu-support-in-mainline-linux-status-update-week-13/
Tido Posted April 15, 2018 Posted April 15, 2018 Release the libVA improvements when the kernel driver patch series is ready for submission, sometime next week. read more here: https://bootlin.com/ 1
Tido Posted May 23, 2018 Posted May 23, 2018 do not forget to read about their efforts.. We have also tested Sunxi-Cedrus on the H3 and started looking at integrating the display part.. 1
TonyMac32 Posted May 24, 2018 Posted May 24, 2018 I'm reading as things pop up, and keeping my eye on the Lima code, I saw yuq push a couple patches to the kernel recently, so that's exciting
Tido Posted June 11, 2018 Posted June 11, 2018 On 5/24/2018 at 3:05 AM, TonyMac32 said: Lima code This is related to the driver for the Mali or am I wrong ? The goal of this Kickstarter is to build a complete VPU support and have it supported in the official Linux kernel. A fully usable state for MPEG2 and H264 decoding, supported in the official Linux kernel. Here are some tables about the current status https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-cedrus#Status Looking at the tables, reading their campaign and stretch goals (by Dec 2018) it looks to me A10, A20, A33 are not yet there with supporting widely used software like: VLC, GStreamer and MPV, while working already on their stretch goal with KODI and H3 SoC according to the latest blog entry. So, I am wondering what can be expected at the end of June as Estimated Delivery on their Kickstarter Campaign for A10, A20, A33 ?
TonyMac32 Posted June 11, 2018 Posted June 11, 2018 Yes, however flawless video decoding doesn't do you much good if it gets written to the screen in torn and incomplete frames. (Unless you're transcoding/converting headless or something) So while the drivers are unrelated code wise, their functions complement, and I'm pretty sure I read a comment about Lima in the Bootlin updates, which is why I mentioned it.
devman Posted June 11, 2018 Posted June 11, 2018 You're right, it's back in the week-20 update. Quote As a sidenote, the free software Lima driver is being prepared for a first RFC series, bringing the first bits of mainline Linux kernel support for Mali GPUs of the Utgard generation. So even though work on the GPU only concerns the proprietary blob for now, the work will eventually become useful to the free software driver as well.
Moklev Posted July 23, 2018 Posted July 23, 2018 They have released the first version (07_2018) https://bootlin.com/blog/allwinner-vpu-main-goals-delivery/ https://linux-sunxi.org/Sunxi-Cedrus#2018.07_Releases
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