Intel DRM Graphics Support For The Minnowboard

Intel GMA500 DRM kernel graphics driver patches were published this morning for supporting the Atom-powered Minnowboard.

For those not familiar with the Minnowboard, it's an Atom-based development board similar in nature to the slew of ARM development boards on the market like the Raspberry Pi, Panda Board, and ODROID. The Minnowboard is based around an Intel Atom E640 with EG20T PCH and GMA600 graphics. The board has 1GB of DDR2 RAm, 1 microSD slot, Serail ATA 2.0, two USB ports, and Gigabit Ethernet. There's also GPI pins and other developer-friendly features. The UEFI-based development board is Yocto 1.3 compatible and officially supports Angstrom Linux.

The Intel Atom E640 isn't a Bay Trail SoC and as such is stuck with PowerVR-derived graphics and not any friendly in-house graphics cores. The GMA600 is supported by the GMA500 "Poulsbo" DRM kernel driver, but special support was required for the Minnowboard.

As outlined in the dri-devel thread from this morning by Patrik Jakobsson who developed these patches, "This set of patches add the pieces needed to get SDVO running on the Minnowboard. The Minnowboard has a special PCI device with it's own io that needs to be programmed in addition to the usual places when dealing with SDVO. The SDVO changes have been tested on Poulsbo and should cause no problems. Oaktrail on the other hand might be affected by LVDS and watermark changes."

For those wanting to learn more about the Minnowboard Atom development platform, visit Minnowboard.org.