H.264 Continues To Be Worked On For Cedrus - Reverse-Engineered Allwinner Support

While the crowd-funding campaign has long been used up for working on the Allwinner VPU support via reverse-engineering for the mainline Linux kernel, Bootlin continues advancing the "Cedrus" driver particularly in getting the H.264 decoding to work.

It's going on three years that Bootlin has been developing the open-source, reverse-engineered Cedrus driver for Allwinner SoCs via reverse engineering to use the VPU. There's been MPEG-2 acceleration within the Cedrus driver that's been mainlined while H.264 and also H.265/HEVC has been a work in progress. The sixth version of the H.264 decoding patches were outed today.

This new version of the H.264 decoding support for Cedrus re-bases against the latest linux-next state and has various code fixes. Ultimately this work will pair with SunXI code in user-space that's been working on exposing the Cedrus kernel driver's capabilities via VDPAU.

Adding H.264 decode to this open-source driver is more than 1,600 lines of new code. These latest patches can be found on the kernel mailing list but hopefully this H.264 Cedrus support will be ready for merging come the Linux 5.2 cycle next month.