Hi,
I'm not sure if this is the kind of question you would consider, but I
once asked them a few questions about AllWinner and Linaro, and they
acknowledge my message, saying they will reply later. (That was about 6
weeks ago...). Here's the list:
* Why did AllWinner decide to join Linaro, and especially the Digital
Home Group?
* There are three levels of membership for companies at Linaro: Core
member, Club member, and Group member. AllWinner joined Linaro as a
Group member, which as I understand is a limited membership, and leads
to several questions:
1. Will AllWinner primarily have an observatory role in the Digital Home
Group, or will the company be actively engaged?
2. Will the work done in the Digital Home Group focus mainly on higher
level applications, or will some work be done on the kernel and drivers
as well, specifically to the parts relating to AllWinner, or in other
words will there be engineers at Linaro working on code specific to
AllWinner?
* I understand there's no AllWinner Landing Team at Linaro, so there
won't be engineering builds targeting AllWinner hardware released by
Linaro. Does AllWinner plan to eventually put more resources into Linaro?
* Do you expect the Linaro membership to affect the way the company
approaches open source development? For example, like many silicon
vendors, AllWinner develop their own SDK (Linux,U-boot, etc..) in house,
and release a vendor tree to direct customers, but it appears many
companies are seeing the benefit of committing code to mainline
(kernel.org), and there's a clear trend in that direction. Now AllWinner
mainline support is mainly performed by linux-sunxi community, so I'm
wondering if AllWinner has any interest in getting involved in this area?
On 08/04/2014 06:14 AM, Simos Xenitellis wrote:
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
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