Allwinner A33 Driver

With a few weeks of delay, we are proud to announce the delivery of the main goals of our 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 Kodi running with our VPU driver on top of a mainline 4.18-rc kernel. Both MPEG2 and H264 are supported, with a fully-optimized pipeline between the VPU and the display side that does not involve any buffer copy or extra transformation that the hardware cannot offload. These results were possible thanks to the previous efforts carried out by the linux-sunxi community, and especially the project. The Cedrus VPU driver running on the A33 and H3 Here were the main goals defined in our crowdfunding campaign, which we promised to deliver end of June 2018, and their status in our delivery: • Making sure that the codec works on the older Allwinner SoCs: A10, A13, A20, A33, R8 and R16.

Hey, I have a Uniscom MZ-81 tablet. My device does not have any volume keys, just power and home button. It has Allwinner A33 processor. My computer does not recognize the device and I could not find any way to access recovery menu, please help, thank you.

This goal is fully met, with more features than planned: the Cedrus driver was brought up on the A10, A13, A20, A33 and H3. Therefore, we included H3 support in this delivery, even though it was originally only part of one of the stretch goals. The R8 is the same as an A13 and the R16 is the same as an A33, so they are supported as well.

• Polishing the existing MPEG2 decoding support to make it fully production ready. This goal is fully met: we have done much more testing of the MPEG2 decoding, and both the Linux kernel code and user-space code supporting MPEG2 has been significantly improved and cleaned up. • Implementing H264 video decoding, since H264 is by far one of the most popular video codec.

This goal is fully met: H264 decoding support has been added to both the Linux kernel driver and the user-space library, including high-profile H264 support. However, the H264 support is still very recent and we expect that additional debugging and improvements will be needed. • Modifying the Allwinner display driver in order to be able to directly display the decoded frames instead of converting and copying those frames. This goal is fully met: the Allwinner DRM driver has received a number of patches to ensure we can use one of the several planes to directly display the video frames in the format provided by the VPU.

Support for hardware scaling has also been fixed to work properly. Those patches have already been contributed to the upstream Linux kernel. The work on the A20 and A33 display driver was done by Bootlin, while the work on the H3 was done by other developers of the community.

• Providing a user-space library easy to integrate in the popular open-source video players. This goal is partially met: while we are providing a user-space libraries that can in theory be used by all libva capable video players, the actual integration with video players is for now only working completely with Kodi. We have started efforts to make it work with both VLC and GStreamer, but the work has not been complete due to various challenges detailed below. This area was definitely much more challenging than we initially expected. • Upstreaming those changes to the official Linux kernel. This goal is almost met: we have posted 5 iterations of the, each time using new versions of the Request API patches, helping improve this API along the way. While our patches have not been merged yet, because the Request API itself hasn’t been merged, they have received significant review from the V4L developers, and we believe our patches are not far from being merged.

Program de taiat si lipit muzica manele. All in all, despite the numerous challenges encountered over the last few months, we are happy to see that we have been able to deliver most of the goals completely, and we are not too far off for the few goals that haven’t yet been fully met. As we will discuss below, we will continue to work in the next months on completing those unfinished steps, and on the stretch goals that received enough funding.