Qualcomm Iris video decoder & encoder gets Linux V4L2 driver

Qualcomm engineer Vikash Garodia has just pushed a commit to add “Qualcomm Iris V4L2 encoder/decoder driver” to mainline Linux enabling support for H.264, H.265, and VP9 decoding, H.264 and H.265 encoding, as well as M2M and STREAMING capabilities.

The Adreno GPUs found in Qualcomm SoC have been supported by the open-source Freedreno driver for several years, but this was not the case with the IP block taking care of hardware video encoding and decoding. The latest patchset addresses this issue for “Qualcomm’s new video acceleration hardware architecture”, meaning it might not work for older Qualcomm processors.

The list of features implemented in the Iris V4L2 encoder/decoder driver:

It’s very hard to find information about the new Iris VPU architecture, so we don’t know which Qualcomm processors rely on the new architecture, except for the sm8550 (Snapdragon 8 Gen 2) that shows up in the patch set. In some ways, Qualcomm is way worse than Allwinner as I’ve never seen a Qualcomm datasheet or technical reference manual myself. That’s because everything is under NDA, but at least they pay people to work on the software side, and software support is usually much better than for companies like Allwinner.

You’ll find a few more details and the code on the Linux Kernel Mailing List.

Via Phoronix and thanks to TLS for the tip.

Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his job as a software engineering manager, and starting to write daily news, and reviews full time later in 2011.

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