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+tags: Replicant news, Paul Kocialkowski
+date: 2018-03-07 22:24
+title: Final days for the upstream Linux Allwinner VPU support crowdfunding campaign
+---
+A [crowdfunding campaign][1] was launched over a month ago by [Bootlin][2] in
+order to fund the development of an [upstream Linux kernel driver for the
+Allwinner CedarX VPU][3]. The VPU (Video Processing Unit) is in charge of
+offloading video decoding and encoding to a dedicated hardware block,
+relieving the main CPU. While Replicant does not support Allwinner devices at
+this point, the project has acquired a number of Allwinner tablets a few years
+ago, that helped with the advancements of Allwinner platforms support in
+upstream projects such as the [U-Boot][4] bootloader and the [Linux
+kernel][5].
+
+Recently, Replicant was a candidate for the Google Summer of Code program and
+we came up with a [list of tasks for the occasion][6]. Although our
+application was not accepted, we are still interested in completing the tasks
+that we picked up. We put a deliberate focus on supporting mobile devices in
+mainline U-Boot and Linux, with a particular emphasis on Allwinner devices,
+the Optimus Black and the Kindle Fire (first generation). We believe that
+supporting mobile devices and using standard driver interfaces in the upstream
+Linux kernel is the only sustainable way for freedom on mobile devices.
+Instead of writing device-specific code specifically for Android for each of
+the supported devices, this would allow using generic Hardware Abstraction
+layers (HALs), reducing the amount of work for hardware support on the
+Replicant side in the long run. This also allows running other operating
+systems that integrate the upstream Linux kernel interfaces, such as standard
+GNU/Linux distributions.
+
+In spite of this, I have been dedicating more and more time to contributing to
+upstream projects such as [coreboot][7], [U-Boot][8] and [Linux][9] for
+supporting devices of various form factors, including mobile devices, laptops
+and single-board computers. Thus, I became less and less active on the
+technical side for Replicant, where Wolfgang and others have picked-up the
+work. There is still a lot of room for contributions and everyone is warmly
+encouraged to join-in and help with the upstreaming effort for devices,
+especially regarding the Optimus Black, Kindle Fire (first generation) and
+Allwinner devices.
+
+As a student approaching graduation, I have joined [Bootlin][2] (formerly Free
+Electrons) in Toulouse, France for an internship focused on supporting the
+[Allwinner VPU][10] in upstream Linux and userspace. It definitely fits
+perfectly with the logic behind focusing Replicant towards upstream Linux
+support. In order to accelerate the development of the driver, Bootlin has
+decided to start a [crowdfunding campaign][1] in order to fund Maxime Ripard,
+who has been working for the company and maintaining [Allwinner platforms in
+the Linux kernel][11] for a while.
+
+As the main goal of the campaign was reached within its first week, Maxime
+will be able to work with me on the VPU. His in-depth understanding of the
+[sun4i DRM video driver’s innards][12] will also reveal very useful for
+accelerating the processing of the frames coming from the VPU (without
+unneeded copies of buffers) and implementing scaling in hardware. In order to
+support the VPU hardware efficiently, a number of changes have to be
+introduced to the Linux kernel. It currently lacks an interface to provide
+coherency between setting specific controls for the media stream and the
+input/output buffers that these controls are related to and should apply to.
+This API has been implemented by Alexandre Courbot (who’s working at Google on
+the Chromium OS project) as the [V4L2 request API][13], that fits the
+requirements for the Allwinner VPU driver. Other VPU drivers, such as the
+[tegra-vde driver][14] that supports the Tegra 20 video decoder engine, also
+require this API in order to implement a proper [V4L2 mem2mem driver][15].
+
+The [crowdfunding campaign][1] still has 10 days to go and two stretch goals
+to meet (while the first stretch goal, about supporting newer Allwinner SoCs
+was already met):
+
+* H265 video decoding support
+
+* H264 encoding support
+
+> As I am not directly impacted by the funding received through the
+> crowdfunding campaign, we believe that there is no direct conflict of
+> interest writing this blog post on the Replicant blog.
+
+ [1]: <https://bootlin.com/blog/allwinner-vpu-crowdfunding/>
+
+ [2]: <https://bootlin.com/>
+
+ [3]: <https://linux-sunxi.org/Cedrus>
+
+ [4]: <https://www.denx.de/wiki/U-Boot>
+
+ [5]: <https://www.kernel.org/>
+
+ [6]:
+<https://redmine.replicant.us/projects/replicant/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2018>
+
+ [7]: <https://review.coreboot.org/cgit/coreboot.git/>
+
+ [8]: <http://git.denx.de/?p=u-boot.git;a=summary>
+
+ [9]: <https://git.kernel.org/torvalds/>
+
+ [10]: <https://linux-sunxi.org/Video_Engine>
+
+ [11]: <https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/sunxi/linux.git/>
+
+ [12]:
+<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/gpu/drm/sun4i>
+
+ [13]: <https://www.spinics.net/lists/linux-media/msg129314.html>
+
+ [14]:
+<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/drivers/staging/media/tegra-
+vde>
+
+ [15]:
+<https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/include/media/v4l2-mem2mem.h>
+
+