Bootlin Wraps Up Feature Development On The Allwinner Cedrus VPU Driver

While the Allwinner VPU "Cedrus" video decode driver is a wonderful success of open-source third-party work expanding Linux's multimedia hardware acceleration capabilities, consulting firm Bootlin who spearheaded this driver is for now at least is ending feature development on this driver.

The talented folks at Bootlin who specialize in embedded Linux development had been working on this Linux kernel driver developed independent of Allwinner but for their VPU hardware. This was made possible via crowd-funding for improving the hardware-accelerated video decoding potential in particular for Allwinner SoCs.

From this crowdfunding they achieved their goals of upstreaming the driver, supporting MPEG-2 / H.264 / H.265 decode, VA-API support in user-space, and working for all the relevant SoCs.

The Cedrus driver is in great shape with the mainline kernel though now at least from the Bootlin side they are putting their work into maintenance mode. The crowdfunded work is over so unless customers come up with specific engagements to continue work on the driver, feature work is over.

Among other features that could still be added are H.264 encoding, high-profile H.264 decode, and support for additional video codecs. More details on the Bootlin blog.