RKVDEC2 Driver Posted For Accelerated Video Decoding On Newer Rockchip SoCs

For years there has been the RKVDEC Linux media driver to provide accelerated video decoding on Rockchip SoCs. Being worked on now is RKVDEC2 for providing video decoding on the newer Rockchip SoCs.

RKVDEC2 patches were posted on Friday by Collabora's Detlev Casanova. The initial hardware target with RKVDEC2 is on supporting video decode for Rockchip's RK3588. The RK3588 SoC pairs a quad-core Arm Cortex-A76 and quad-core Arm Cortex-A55 with a Mali-G610 MC4 graphics, a basic NPU, and video accelerated decode for H.264 / H.265 / AV1 / AVS2.

The RKVDEC2 is being developed since with the newer SoCs is second-generation Rockchip video decode IP. There are dual video decoders on the RK3588 for supporting up to 8K@30 video but with the initial Linux driver only using one video decoder at a time is currently supported. This driver also is initially limited to H.264 even though HEVC/H.265, VP9, AV1, and AVS2 are also supported by the hardware.

The RKVDEC2 driver is based in part on the original RKVDEC driver. Those interested in this second-generation Rockchip video decode driver for Linux can find the initial patches under review on the kernel mailing list. Along with the forthcoming NPU driver, the RK3588 has been seeing a lot of nice upstream driver support work.