BSP Tracker / BSP Status / Amlogic
Amlogic A311D (G12B)
Strong community mainline: CPU, GPU, video decode and even the NPU node are upstream. Hardware video encode and the camera path are not. Since there is no maintained vendor BSP to fall back on, mainline is effectively the only serious option.
Mainline instead of the vendor BSP
Can you ship mainline instead, and what exactly do you lose if you do?
Mainline, with named losses
| Block | IP | Upstream | Detail |
|---|---|---|---|
| GPU | Mali-G52 (Bifrost) | upstream | amlogic,meson-g12a-mali; panfrost. |
| VPU decode | VDEC_1 / VDEC_HEVC | upstream | drivers/staging/media/meson/vdec — still in staging. |
| VPU encode | Amlogic encoder | unverified | No upstream encoder binding or driver found; the Amlogic media binding is decode-only. |
| NPU | VeriSilicon VIP | upstream | npu@ff100000 compatible vivante,gc, driven by etnaviv. Usable through etnaviv/Teflon, not through an Amlogic NN SDK. |
| ISP | Amlogic ISP | unverified | No upstream driver found. |
Vendor BSP
Repository. https://github.com/khadas/linux
Newest branch that actually exists. khadas-linux-6.12.y, tracking Linux 6.12. Last commit 2025-08-05.
Cadence. There is no public Amlogic vendor tree. The nearest thing is a board vendor's fork, and it has not been touched in about eleven months. In practice the ecosystem IS mainline, plus a dormant fork.
Silicon longevity
The vendor publishes no commitment. Amlogic publishes no longevity, EOL or lifecycle page of any kind. Nothing.
Yocto
Layer. meta-meson. No branch for the current Yocto LTS.
No wrynose branch. The newest release branch is scarthgap (Yocto 5.0). This is a community layer, not an Amlogic-maintained one.
Hardware you can buy
Evaluate on. Khadas VIM3 (SBC), Banana Pi BPI-M2S (SBC), Radxa ZERO 2 Pro (SBC)
No third-party production module found. Plan to design the SoC down onto your own board, or choose different silicon.
Notes
For a production programme A311D is effectively not served by a real SoM. The VIM3 is an SBC, not a module, and no industrial SoM vendor was found. Combined with zero published longevity, this is a hard SoC to justify for a commercial product.
What to do about it
Amlogic A311D (G12B): upstream fixes stop December 2028. That leaves 29 months. After that date the kernel this BSP is based on receives no further security fixes from upstream, and maintaining it becomes your team’s responsibility.
There are three options:
- Backport the fixes yourself. Your team maintains a kernel that nobody else maintains: tracking each CVE, applying the patch to a tree that has diverged from upstream, and testing the result, for as long as the product ships.
- Move to the vendor’s newer BSP. This gives you a few more years of upstream fixes, and it costs a second bring-up: a new kernel, your patches forward-ported, drivers re-validated, and the product re-tested.
- Move to mainline. Mainline supports part of this SoC. The blocks marked above are the ones a migration has to solve or replace. It is the only option that does not have to be repeated when the next vendor kernel reaches end of life.
All three are engineering work, and all three are work we do: reading vendor kernel trees, checking what mainline actually supports, and moving products from one to the other. This page is built from the same work.
Get the updates
An email when a kernel series reaches end of life, a board row changes, or a layer picks up a release branch. Nothing else.
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