Back in 2012, Bootlin engineer Maxime Ripard pioneered the support for Allwinner processors in the official Linux kernel. Today, thanks to the contributions of numerous developers around the world and our involvement, there is very good support for a large number of Allwinner processors in the Linux kernel, to the point where actual Allwinner-based products are shipping with the mainline kernel.

Despite this major effort, there is one area that has remained unsupported in the mainline kernel: the video decoding and encoding engine, which allows to accelerate in hardware the decoding and encoding of popular codecs such as MPEG2, MPEG4 or H264. Last summer, we successfully implemented a prototype, supporting MPEG2 decoding and partially MPEG4 decoding.

Today, we are launching a crowdfunding campaign to fund the remainder of the development: finishing MPEG4 decoding support, implementing H264 decoding, optimizing the rendering of video frames in cooperation with the display driver, and upstreaming the driver. We also have additional goals of supporting H265, encoding support, and additional Allwinner SoCs.

In the vendor-provided kernel, this video decoding/encoding unit is supported by a kernel driver that uses a non-standard user-space API, in conjunction with a binary-only userspace blob. Fortunately, a number of people have done an enormous reverse engineering effort, which we have leveraged for our existing prototype, and which we intend to use to continue the development of this upstream driver. Both Maxime Ripard and our intern Paul Kocialkowski will be working on this crowdfunded project.

This is our first crowdfunding campaign to fund upstream Linux kernel development, and we are interested in seeing how much interest there is in such a financing model. Help us making this a success by spreading the word!