Following on from the article posted at cnx-software, as some of you may already know BayLibre has been working on adding support for Amlogic SoC’s to the mainline linux kernel.
Whilst this is still some way off from being usable in our releases, there is great progress being made by BayLibre and Maxim Jourdan who has recently submitted a patch set to add support for hardware video decoding.
To date support has been added for MPEG 1/2/4, H.263, H.264, MJPEG, HEVC 8-bit (partial) hardware video decoding with HEVC 10-bit, VP9, VC1 in the to-do list.
The future is certainly looking bright for Amlogic based devices.
So this means that CE will be able to jump to the new kernel mainline 4.X instead of 3.X and we won’t have to stick with the old one with tons of patches?
Yah, just wanted to confirm this. I know that if this driver wouldn’t happen, then some users using ie. S912 (like me), would be forced to stick to Kodi 18. Now this shouldn’t be a problem, which makes me happy (although I’m pretty sure that my chinese box will be dead 3 times before Kodi 19 happens)
I would guess that at least initially there would be a loss of functionality with the move to mainline, so I would expect a period of many months before the Kodi experience matched that achieved with the 3.14 kernel.
Progress to a stable experience is likely to be painfully slow, and for most people sticking with the 3.14 kernel would be the best thing.
To be honest right now I don’t care about kernel 4.X, however I do care about possibility of porting this new driver to existing kernel 3.14 so we could have hardware accelleration in CE I’m not sure if this would be even possible.
3.14 will not have the V4L infrastructure for the driver and no one is going to go to the trouble of backporting it when the focus will be on getting AML mainline kernel stable. When the driver is mature it will force a migration to mainline, it is all the other subsystems (such as power management) which may need tweaking before that matches the functionality of 3.14 kernel. However a lot of that work should be already done by the people at Ubuntu Canonical.
The experience of other opensource video drivers, such as the Nouveau driver, shows that it took years for it to approach the performance of the closed source drivers from Nvidea, so moving to mainline might not be what people expect.
It is only the fact that the Kodi team is going to force everyones hand that will make the transition inevitable, many would prefer to stick to what works.
The ability to switch to mainline kernel, and have Kodi 19 work on it.
It would also get rid of a bunch of other issues we have with the ancient 3.14 kernel.
The VPU based acceleration with V4L is only one part of the mainline game, and the simplest one also.
We need GLES 2.0 mainline DRM, Lima project is working on it, but the status is quite far from being usable is general deployment, at least as far as I know.
Also, the Mali in the S912 is supported by Panfrost project that is even behind the Lima status
I’m not sure if this would be even possible.
