Hi All, Nicolas (from ARMDevices.net) has conducted quite a few interviews with Chinese hardware companies around Shenzhen. There are several videos with Allwinner, such as http://armdevices.net/2014/07/23/allwinner-64bit-armv8-processor-announced/
I think it would be a good opportunity to interview Allwinner about issues with source code development. At https://plus.google.com/u/0/+charbax/posts/6uqUutxjQiw (see comments) he is OK to either mail Allwinner or arrange to visit them for a video interview. My preference would be an interview on camera and I believe it should be feasible. There may not be immediate results out of this, however it would be great to have some official response. What's needed is to describe to Nicolas what questions to ask. I am not familiar with all important questions that can be asked so it would be good to help add to the list, and explain to Nicolas so that he can discuss them at ease. Here is my attempt with a question. Feel free to correct me. 1. The Linux kernel holds now the hardware description of SoCs in a data format called Device Tree (DT). There are more details about DT at http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/petazzoni-device-tree-dummies.pdf For example, here is the DT file for the Rockchip 3188, https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/arch/arm/boot/dts/rk3188.dtsi While many manufacturers have provided DT files for their products, there are none yet from Allwinner. Here we can ask for Allwinner to provide them for all SoCs, or we can ask specific details that will help to produce those files. Do we have a preference? 2. Source code in mainline Linux. We explain why it is important, etc. There is a list of items (mainly drivers) at http://linux-sunxi.org/Linux_mainlining_effort Are these drivers without any released source code? Has the source code been released but it needs lots of work to add to mainline? What should we ask Allwinner to do? 3. There is the separate issue with the GPU drivers which I think is beyond what Allwinner could do. There is part of the driver that comes with the Linux kernel and allows hardware acceleration within Android. That facility is used with Mir and Wayland to get hardware acceleration. Is there anything that needs to be asked about Mali and PowerVR Linux kernel drivers? Simos -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "linux-sunxi" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
