Allwinner "Cedrus" Media Driver Finally Sees Support For VP8 Decode

Linux's Cedrus media driver that provides video decoding on various Allwinner SoCs is finally seeing support added for VP8. But given this addition for Linux 5.11 won't be out as stable until well into 2021 and most of the world has moved onto VP9, it may not be too beneficial at this stage.

The Cedrus media driver has been working out well for various Allwinner SoCs and supporting the likes of H.264/H.265 decoding. But with Linux 5.11 is the ability to handle VP8 content. Unfortunately rather late for mainline. Cedrus in Linux 5.11 is also seeing support for the Allwinner R40, V3s, and other improvements.

The media changes for the Linux 5.11 merge window also include a new driver for a Meson 2D acceleration unit, the Rockchip "RKISP1" driver being promoted out of staging, and other additions.

That Meson 2D driver is "GE2D" and is for the Amlogic GE2D Accelerator Unit found on the AXG SoC fmaily. Various 2D features are supported and the driver exposes it as a memory-to-memory V4L2 streaming device for video rotation / flipping / cropping / compositing / format conversion.

The rkisp1 driver promoted out of staging is for the image signal processing block on various Rockchip SoCs. More details on that here.