Re: [linux-sunxi] KMS - VE - Lima

[Manuel Braga]

On Tue, 22 Sep 2015 11:09:23 +0200 Andreas Baierl 
wrote:
> I recognized, that there has already been done some basic (and more
> or less complete) work on each of that tasks by different developers.
> I won't list the names, involved people know them, and something
> is/was listed in our wiki, too.
> In summary the basic question is, if these developers intend to
> finish their work at sometime or plan to share their efforts. If not,
> what are the reasons, why this seems to be "paused". Personal mood,
> Allwinner, payment, time? Is there anything that can be done by the
> community to help?

Well, where should this start?
Is oblivious that the problem is not technical. You and others already
know some of this story, but this is a very delicate matter that without
the complete picture of the events, some of the new people that just
joined (sunxi) will think as bizarre some of the behavior and decisions
taken.
To not get (again) be "accused" of not working "hard" enough, there
must be caution in how to describe this situation. To do so, some
context is need and if not clear enough, please make questions.
Sorry to repeat all the same things, that we all would prefer not to get
involved in (if we had the choice).

My version of events, in the video engine context only.
(correction welcome if any thing is not the right truth)

 - somehow, allwinner publish the A10 kernel/bootloader source code,
   that triggers the formation of the linux-sunxi community, as that
   was so uncommon for a Chinese arm soc vendor.

 - lot of interest around the allwinner socs, including some developers
   of a popular media player, that with allwinner cooperation worked to
   add hardware decoding support. But. After some time, those
   same developers unsatisfied by the level of cooperation given by
   allwinner, ceased all the work.

   This was the event that made the allwinner-proprietary-driver-library
   have bad reputation, equal to a piece of manure.
   (which is not full deserved, is true that proprietary-driver-library
   had/has some problems, but other than that, it works.)(only is need
   some willing to spend the time to make it work.)

 - people started to think about reverse-engineering.
   as is what happens when there is hardware that one what to use, but
   the software side is "limiting" said use.
   But unfortunately, this first try didn't achieve the momentum need.

 - some months later, the wish to reverse-engineering reemerged again,
   this time with more people (which i am one of them)

 - after some weeks (around a month or so), came to light the existence
   of multiple license violations in the proprietary-driver-libraries,
   (multiple, because wasn't only a L(GPL) violation)

 - but, as we all were so happy and hopeful of allwinner that appeared
   to be following and doing the right thing.
   Together with the finding that the video engine hardware was easy to
   reserse-engineering.
   We just chosen to not go bother allwinner about this, and ignore the
   license violations.

Looking back, i am now of opinion that this was a huge mistake.


 - a year passed, and with the new A80 soc, massive license violations
   emerged, together with an difficulty to communicate with allwinner,
   and its close board vendor (cubieboard)

 - at this point the discussions (mainly in the irc) of this situation,
   referred to again this video-engine proprietary-driver-library
   license violations

   At this point i believe that allwinner was contacted about the
   existence of this license violations, and was given (to allwinner) a
   solution in which all sides ended as all winner, a solution that if
   allwinner had chosen to accept would not required that this license
   violations be made public.
   This happened to my best knowledge around july/june of 2014, as
   i was not involved in this dialog, dont know its date.

At this point, we all know what happened, and is not need specific in
detail.

Allwinner did not choose to collaborate with the linux-sunxi community,
instead allwinner came into this community expecting that we, this
open-source community accept a proprietary-driver-library with such
unacceptable license violations.

At the face of this, we can not stay silence.


But you may ask, why is important that this license violations in the
proprietary-driver-library be resolved, if we prefer to
reverse-engineering and to work to write a fully 100% open-source-driver.

The unwillingness of allwinner to resolve or to dialogue with the
community to find a solution, creates uncertain about the future.

Will allwinner respect the license of this new driver written by this
community?

This is a question that i personally would like to be answered.
As i am well aware that media-playback bring certain business
strategies in which an open-source driver is unwanted.

I refuse to be *alone* in the writing of any driver, because i don't
want to be *alone* in the likelihood of having to 

Re: [linux-sunxi] KMS - VE - Lima

[Andreas Baierl]

Am 22.09.2015 um 17:30 schrieb Maxime Ripard:

Hi,

You can extend that list to the A31 and A23.

Yes, sure. I didn't because I do not own A31 and A23 ;)

A DRM/KMS driver is a quite huge task, that require both some kernel
knowledge and that require a lot of time. This is not something that
we can reasonably expect from someone on his spare time, which is
probably why it failed to go anywhere: people just got bored and moved
to other things.

I worked on this for something like a full month now, and I started to
get some results last week. It's quite minimal for now, it only
supports a single plane, a single pipeline, and on an RGB
output. There's still some glitches and it doesn't display the test
patterns I have, but it actually displays something now. I'd really
like to have something more useful and actually usable in the upcoming
weeks.

Maxime
Nice to hear, that some work is going on here. It's the base for the 
other 2 tasks imho.


Regards
rellla

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[linux-sunxi] KMS - VE - Lima

[Andreas Baierl]

Hi community,

i decided to write a short email to our list in order to ask for the 
status of the mainline effort of display driver, video engine and mali.
First of all, please don't get me wrong. This is no begging mail, it's 
just a try to bring us up-to-date what's going on with these features - 
if any work is planned on this or is even done already.
Giving thanks to the mainlining developers we are at a point, where most 
of the features of the sunxi devices (mostly A10/A20) are supported very 
well in the mainline kernel.


To make these SoCs useable by the brighter mass, e.g. the multimedia or 
the desktop guys, there are "only" the display/video tasks missing.
For what i know, Allwinner was and is still neither interested nor 
actively supporting that efforts in bringing their SoCs mainline. I 
followed that story - especially the GPL thing - nearly from the 
beginning and want to ask, if there is any news in Allwinner's attitude 
regarding this all?
I recognized, that there has already been done some basic (and more or 
less complete) work on each of that tasks by different developers. I 
won't list the names, involved people know them, and something is/was 
listed in our wiki, too.
In summary the basic question is, if these developers intend to finish 
their work at sometime or plan to share their efforts. If not, what are 
the reasons, why this seems to be "paused". Personal mood, Allwinner, 
payment, time? Is there anything that can be done by the community to help?


And, again, i don't beg and i'm not allowed to beg for anything, because 
i  haven't contributed to mainline yet and don't have the skills and 
time to do that atm, at least for the bigger things.
This email is just about trying to give us an update and maybe start a 
little discussion - if anybody wants to do so. Constructive discussion 
for sure :p
If not, please notice, that there is at least one little user that 
honors the work of all contributors.


Regards
Andreas

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Re: [linux-sunxi] KMS - VE - Lima

[Maxime Ripard]

Hi,

On Tue, Sep 22, 2015 at 11:09:23AM +0200, Andreas Baierl wrote:
> i decided to write a short email to our list in order to ask for the status
> of the mainline effort of display driver, video engine and mali.
> First of all, please don't get me wrong. This is no begging mail, it's just
> a try to bring us up-to-date what's going on with these features - if any
> work is planned on this or is even done already.
> Giving thanks to the mainlining developers we are at a point, where most of
> the features of the sunxi devices (mostly A10/A20) are supported very well

You can extend that list to the A31 and A23.

> in the mainline kernel.
> 
> To make these SoCs useable by the brighter mass, e.g. the multimedia or the
> desktop guys, there are "only" the display/video tasks missing.
>
> For what i know, Allwinner was and is still neither interested nor actively
> supporting that efforts in bringing their SoCs mainline. I followed that
> story - especially the GPL thing - nearly from the beginning and want to
> ask, if there is any news in Allwinner's attitude regarding this all?
> I recognized, that there has already been done some basic (and more or less
> complete) work on each of that tasks by different developers. I won't list
> the names, involved people know them, and something is/was listed in our
> wiki, too.
>
> In summary the basic question is, if these developers intend to finish their
> work at sometime or plan to share their efforts. If not, what are the
> reasons, why this seems to be "paused". Personal mood, Allwinner, payment,
> time? Is there anything that can be done by the community to help?

A DRM/KMS driver is a quite huge task, that require both some kernel
knowledge and that require a lot of time. This is not something that
we can reasonably expect from someone on his spare time, which is
probably why it failed to go anywhere: people just got bored and moved
to other things.

I worked on this for something like a full month now, and I started to
get some results last week. It's quite minimal for now, it only
supports a single plane, a single pipeline, and on an RGB
output. There's still some glitches and it doesn't display the test
patterns I have, but it actually displays something now. I'd really
like to have something more useful and actually usable in the upcoming
weeks.

Maxime

-- 
Maxime Ripard, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com

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