News today about the Allwinner SoCs. First from Olimex:
CedarX for Allwinner is liberated!
http://olimex.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/cedarx-for-allwinner-is-liberated/
This makes Allwinner SoCs one step ahead all competitors as the GPU/VPU proprietary blobs is what makes most of ARM devices not completely opened. [...] Allwinner SoC thanks to open source community now is one of the most Open Source friendly SoC with: Open Source bootloader(contributed by Allwinner), Open GPU (lima project), Open VPU (cedarus).
and another one of my favorite blogs on embedded, CNX Software:
Preliminary Reverse-Engineered VPU Driver (CedarX) for AllWinner A10 Plays H.264 Videos
http://www.cnx-software.com/2013/08/30/preliminary-reverse-engineered-vpu-driver-cedarx-for-allwinner-a10-plays-h-264-videos/#ixzz2dTw61LMG
Allwinner framework for their Video Processing Unit (VPU) in their Cortex A8 processors (A10, A13, etc..) is called CedarX. It relies on a binary blob that is working just fine for Android, but not so well for Linux. So several developers started to reverse-engineer CedarX a while back, to fix issues with Linux, and provide an open source driver.
I'm quite excited to see the Open Source community making progress with opening up the graphics and video capabilities of SoCs. Hopefully it will empower engineers and makers to design exciting new projects!
Cheers,
Drew
