NXP Continues Work On Linux Driver Bring-Up Of "Amphion" Video Encoder/Decoder

NXP engineers continue persevering for bringing up a mainline-suitable, open-source kernel driver for their Amphion video encoder/decoder hardware. Out today is their 15th revision to the Amphion driver patches.

The Amphion v15 driver patches were posted this morning for handling this video encoder and decoder found via the video (VPU) block with the NXP i.MX8Q platforms. Initially the IMX8QXP and IMX8QM SoCs are supported by this Amphion driver work.

The NXP IMX8QXP evaluation/developer board.

With the current open-source patches and for what the Amphion hardware can support, exposed are decoding for H.264, HEVC, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, VC1, and VP8 content. Meanwhile accelerated encode is limited to H.264.

While the AMphion encoder/decoder driver is open-source, it does depend upon binary-only firmware that was already upstreamed into linux-firmware.git.

As with most of the prior revisions to the Amphion driver, most of the code churn is around bug fixes for this proposed media driver.

Those interested in NXP i.MX8Q hardware and wanting to learn more about this in-progress Amphion driver can do so via the v15 patch series.