Open-source developer Bootlin has announced the end of its funded programme to develop and upstream open-source mainline drivers for the video processing unit (VPU) hardware in Allwinner’s system-on-chip products, but has pledged to continue best-effort development despite having exhausted the crowdfunded budget.

Bootlin announced its campaign to fund development of an open-source driver bundle for Allwinner VPUs back in February. Following a successful funding run, the company was able to deliver all primary goals by July, making it possible to use the hardware acceleration features of Allwinner’s VPUs using a mainstream Linux kernel for the first time.

Now, with the budget spent and the end of Paul Kocialkowski’s internship at the company, Bootlin has offered a final update on the project. “Over the past six months, we have worked hard to reach the goals announced in the project’s crowdfunding campaign and we were able to deliver most of the main goals last month,” the company writes.

“We have now exhausted the budget that was provided through the crowdfunding campaign: both Maxime Ripard’s time (who worked mainly on the H264 decoding and helping with DRM topics) and Paul’s internship are over, and therefore the remaining work will be done on a best-effort basis, without direct funding,” the company explains. “This will therefore be the last weekly update, but we will be publishing updates once in a while when interesting progress is made.”

Work continues on tweaking the patches for upstream inclusion, adding support for the newer Allwinner H5 and A64 chips, and integrating the userspace drivers with popular open-source media playback software.