Allwinner VPU support for the Linux kernel(kickstarter.com) |
Allwinner VPU support for the Linux kernel(kickstarter.com) |
To me this is a no-brainer.
Why would they fund it? If they saw the potential benefits, they could probably open source their own closed source drivers and avoid this Kickstarter being needed, or at the very least provide documentation to speed this work along.
Even without getting lawyers involved, I don't see how they could do any of the above tasks for less than the price of this Kickstarter.
Couldn’t that path just be left without acceleration, being it’s a less complex codec to begin with, usage is not growing, and the data sources are likely smaller to begin with (no 4k for example)?
http://linux-sunxi.org/VE_Register_guide
the device is generally single-function for each codec, with the decoding pipeline implemented in actual hardware. Unless you were able to express your kernel as a data transform used in a common video codec and express your I/O data as pixels, you're unlikely to accelerate a general purpose task this way.
https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/8118991/
You can see it's quite specific to the primitives the codec needs. If you want general purpose, we now have Vulkan for that.
(And this one is reasonably low-level. On some like the Raspberry Pi, you throw bitstream over the wall to a coprocessor which gives you YUV back)
They don't need to open source the whole toolchain, just the parts of the code they own/wrote themselves. For the parts of the toolchain they can provide documentation (writing it out if this documentation needed to be created/revised) to fill in the missing pieces.
> "I don't see how they could do any of the above tasks for less than the price of this Kickstarter."
You seem to be overlooking that reverse engineering hardware drivers is a hugely inefficient process. People only do it out of necessity. Furthermore, the Kickstarter has set modest goals of enhancing the work that has already been done (MPEG2 acceleration, etc...), the end result is not a driver that can be used for more general purpose graphics acceleration (e.g. no OpenGL driver). That's not to say it isn't a good step forward, I welcome it, but you should be aware that there's a long road ahead after the work for the Kickstarter has been completed. If you don't believe me, look at the ongoing work being done by the Nouveau team.
(Though I noticed on VLC's website that the EC could try to change that: https://www.videolan.org/press/patents.html)
Lastly, with the 'supply of documentation' approach, does this (to your knowledge) carry the same legal risks?
A competitor could easily dissect the code and figure out what blocks and/or techniques are violating their patent rights.
How would an open-source driver developed by a third party be less effective at doing so?