Cedrus VPU Decoder Driver Being Mainlined With New Linux Media Request API

The Cedrus VPU driver developed by Bootlin for supporting the Allwinner VPU open-source support via crowdfunding is set to hit the mainline kernel for Linux 4.20~5.0.

The Cedrus VPU driver is what was developed over six months this year at Bootlin via a crowd-funded internship that raised over thirty-six thousand dollars (USD) for the effort.

This driver made a lot of progress for advancing video decode on Allwinner SoCs as open-source and for Linux 4.20 this driver appears ready.

The Cedrus VPU decoder driver was submitted for mainline today as part of a new experimental media request API for this next kernel. This new media request API has been years in the works and is intended to allow device drivers to dynamically change the parameters they need for each new video frame being decoded. The latest Google camera and codec HAL depend upon such functionality while now it's coming to the mainline Linux kernel initially with support for stateless codecs. The Cedrus video decoder driver supports this new API as well as the Vivid virtual driver.

Details via this pull request that is bringing over six thousand lines of new code to the kernel between this new media request API and the Cedrus driver.