We’ve already seen Neil Armstrong, part of BayLibre, worked on adding Amlogic SoC (S905/S905X/S912) to mainline Linux via our virtual schedule for the Embedded Linux Conference & OpenIoT Summit 2017. But at the time, although we could see some activity in Linux 4.10 including support for Nexbox A95X and Nexbox A1, they did provide that much details the work that had been done, but since then, ELC 2017 videos have been released, and BayLibre wrote a short post about 3D Graphics support in mainline Linux.

We can see that I/Os, USB host, composite video output, Ethernet, eMMC/SDIO, and PSCI and SCPI features have already been added to Linux 4.10. but some important features have not yet including HDMI, Mali support, Audio, and high speed eMMC modes. HDMI is actually planned for Linux 4.12, which could be released in about 18 weeks if we keep the 10 weeks kernel release schedule we had in the past. WeTek Hub and Play 2 devices tree files have been submitted for Linux 4.11. Beside TV boxes, development boards such as ODROID-C2 and Khadas Vim will also be supported and benefit from this work.

While Mali is not supported in mainline Linux yet, the patchsets for Mali-450 GPU are available on github in order to enable 3D graphics acceleration in Amlogic S905, S905X and S905X. If you are interested to get more details, you may want to watch Neil Armstrong presentation at ELC 2017 which explains the status of Amlogic Linux before working on mainline, the work achieved, the work in progress, and an overview of the community.

You may also want to download the presentation slides for an overview of the talk, and check out linux-meson.com and BayLibre blog for future updates.

Thanks to Space Invader, theguyuk, and Harley for the tips.