MSM DRM Will Support New Hardware In Linux 3.14

An early patch-set has been sent out by Rob Clark as he prepares the "MSM" DRM driver changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel. This open-source DRM graphics driver will support at least two new boards in the next kernel development cycle.

The MSM driver is Rob Clark's work on coming up with a proper Direct Rendering Manager driver for Qualcomm's graphics hardware found in their Snapdragon SOCs. After Rob made much progress on the Freedreno Gallium3D driver for the 3D side of the Adreno GPU, Rob lately has been devoting a fair amount of attention to this new DRM driver to avoid having to use Qualcomm's Android-focused kernel driver.

The MSM driver was merged into the Linux 3.12 kernel, picked up more features in Linux 3.13, and will now come with new hardware support in Linux 3.14.

The new hardware that Rob Clark has been working to support by this driver is the APQ8060a "Bstem Board" that has an MDP4 display controller with Adreno 320 GPU and the APQ8074 "Dragon Board" with its new MDP5 display controller and an Adreno 330 GPU. Just this weekend Rob Clark got the A330 compiler support into Mesa's Freedreno driver while on the display side the MDP5 is all new. The MSM driver doesn't yet support a hardware cursor or plane support for the MDP5 display controller, but knowing Rob that will change in due time.

While we're still many weeks out from seeing the Linux 3.14 kernel merge window, this work so far queued up for Linux 3.14 consists of 13 patches and pulls in eight thousand new lines of code and does away with three thousand lines of code. More details on this latest MSM driver work can be found via the dri-devel mailing list thread.