Hantro VPU Driver With Linux 5.14 Adds G2 Decoder Support With HEVC

The Hantro media driver within the Linux kernel for supporting the Hantro IP-based VPU found in Rockchip and NXP i.MX8M SoCs is seeing improvements with the in-development Linux 5.14 kernel.

The Hantro VPU driver with Linux 5.14 brings support for the second VPU found with the NXP i.MX8MQ SoC. To date only the first VPU (G1) has been supported by this driver while now support for the G2 is also wired up. With the G2 VPU support there is now basic HEVC/H.265 decoding support in place.

Making use of this secondary VPU on supported SoCs does require some user-space API updates. In addition to supporting the G2/HEVC decoder, the Hantro driver with Linux 5.14 now supports the Rockchip RK3036 and RK3066 SoCs as well as the Microchip SAMA5D4.

Aside from the Hantro driver work, the media subsystem updates for Linux 5.14 also promote the MPEG-2 stateless control type for the user-space API out of staging, among many other improvements.

The full list of media subsystem feature changes for Linux 5.14 can be found via this pull request.