Freescale's iMX DRM Driver Sees Big Changes

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Freescale's iMX DRM Driver Sees Big Changes

Published on Friday was a massive set of 72 patches to improve the Freescale iMX DRM driver that's currently within the Linux kernel's staging area...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTgyNzg

[Chewi]

Great! I use this driver on my Utilite Pro and prefer it over the MXC driver found in the Freescale kernel because it allows you to override the EDID. The MXC EDID detection sometimes causes kernel panics and I want to override the EDID anyway because my AV unit isn't always switched on. The multiple display feature is especially handy given that the Utilite has two outputs, HDMI and DVI. No audio support though! I was actually trying to port audio support across from the MXC driver just this week but I'm a novice when it comes to kernel hacking; I've almost given up. I sent an e-mail to Nicolin Chen, original author of the MXC driver, but he didn't respond, perhaps because he doesn't appear to work for Freescale any more. I also sent an e-mail to Sascha Hauer, original author of the DRM driver, just last night. No reply yet but maybe I should be speaking to Steve Longerbeam.

On a related note, Christian Gmeiner is quietly making progress on a new DRM version of the Etnaviv driver for Vivante GPUs. The previous driver was limited to framebuffer acceleration only. I'm very excited about this because the closed driver from Freescale isn't fantastic.

[d4ddi0]

exciting development

I am excited to see this improvement, and to see how engaged Freescale now is in the open source community.
The graphics subsystem is IMHO the weakest part of the system in terms of Linux support.
It was interesting to see that this patch set comes from a developer at Mentor Graphics, rather than a Freescale employee.
My company is building a system that uses an imx.6q SoC; I hope that I can contribute in some way.

[liam]

Great! I use this driver on my Utilite Pro and prefer it over the MXC driver found in the Freescale kernel because it allows you to override the EDID. The MXC EDID detection sometimes causes kernel panics and I want to override the EDID anyway because my AV unit isn't always switched on. The multiple display feature is especially handy given that the Utilite has two outputs, HDMI and DVI. No audio support though! I was actually trying to port audio support across from the MXC driver just this week but I'm a novice when it comes to kernel hacking; I've almost given up. I sent an e-mail to Nicolin Chen, original author of the MXC driver, but he didn't respond, perhaps because he doesn't appear to work for Freescale any more. I also sent an e-mail to Sascha Hauer, original author of the DRM driver, just last night. No reply yet but maybe I should be speaking to Steve Longerbeam.

On a related note, Christian Gmeiner is quietly making progress on a new DRM version of the Etnaviv driver for Vivante GPUs. The previous driver was limited to framebuffer acceleration only. I'm very excited about this because the closed driver from Freescale isn't fantastic.

You might want to check-out the linaro irc channels such as #linaro-gfx.