Rockchip Publishes A DRM Driver For Their SoCs

Separate from the new DRM driver to be found in Linux 3.17 that was written about earlier, there's another new DRM driver published this week that has yet to hit the mainline Linux kernel.

A DRM/KMS driver has emerged for supporting the Rockchip ARM SoCs. Rockchip is the growing Chinese company based in Fuzhou that's a growing ARM licensee but has also been dealing with Intel for jointly delivering some future x86 Atom SoCs. Rockchip SoCs are common to tablets and other multimedia devices.

The new Rockchip DRM driver has been tested on their RK3288 developmentboard with LVDS and eDP connections. This driver doesn't provide any 2D/3D hardware acceleration but will just light up the display in about 2,500 lines of code. The driver was developed internally at Rockchip and was published to the kernel mailing list by Mark Yao who seems to be the principal author of this GPLv2 driver.

Given that the code was published this week for the first time and the DRM feature pull request already sent in for the Linux 3.17 merge window, the timing is inopportune but hopefully the Rockchip DRM driver will be prepped and ready for integration with the Linux 3.18 kernel. Besides Rockchip, out on the horizon we're also looking forward to the mainlining of the new Raspberry Pi graphics driver.