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Talk Beginner

Porting AOSP to Allwinner Sunxi platform

Proposal status is Approved
Session Description

With our recent efforts to get upstream Linux Kernel support for Allwinner Sunxi A133 and A523 platforms, this also includes the Display Engine. Although the whole upstream effort relies on reverse engineering the vendor blobs, we have managed to get the end-to-end display pipeline working with GPU and got LVDS and MIPI working. In some cases, we are able to get 2 parallel displays working.

Allwinner ships the most affordable SoCs / silicons for gaming consoles and handheld devices including tablets, all running vendor-provided Android. All of the devices come with closed source and proprietary blobs from Imagination Technologies, ARM Mali, and CedarX for the media pipelines.

This talk walks through our adventurous journey in building AOSP with upstream Linux Kernel 7.1 without any vendor-provided components to run an end-to-end display pipeline. We started our tinkering with Android 16 and easily moved to 17 (only released 6 days ago - relative to the date of this submission).

Key Takeaways

  • One doesn't need to get locked in with vendor-provided Android

  • How to reverse engineer all the needed components to get an end-to-end working AOSP

  • How the community can lead the way to try this for the A733 or any upcoming silicons from Allwinner, or any SoC vendor for that matter

References

https://lore.kernel.org/linux-sunxi/a5f6aeb1-b038-462e-8989-c4da65966134@linumiz.com/
https://lore.kernel.org/linux-sunxi/02b20361-23cf-4aa7-8f85-875261e6cdc9@linumiz.com/

Which track are you applying for?

Android Open Source Project (AOSP)

Speakers

Bharathiraja Embedded Software Engineer | Linumiz

Bharathiraja Nallathambi is an embedded systems engineer at Linumiz with 15+ years of experience, working at the intersection of RISC-V, FPGAs, and the Zephyr software stack. His interests span hardware software co-design and cryptographic hardware. Pursued doctoral research in FPGA-based fault diagnosis for lightweight cryptographic hardware, with a publication in Elsevier Microprocessors and Microsystems.
Bharathiraja
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bharathiraja-nallathambi
Karthikeyan Technical Lead | Linumiz

With 5+ years of experience primarily in Embedded Linux and Zephyr RTOS, Karthikeyan started exploring AOSP as an option to expand the portfolio for Linumiz and also as a hobbyist. Quickly, AOSP became more than a weekend hobby, leading a team working closely with customers needing upstream. Karthi also works closely with security components like OP-TEE, DM-Crypt, and Secure Boot to help address the Cyber Resilience Act.
Karthikeyan