QuIC Continues Contributing To Open-Source MDP DRM/KMS Driver

Qualcomm's Innovation Center continues contributing to the open-source MDP DRM driver that started out as a reverse-engineered display driver for Qualcomm's ARM SoCs via Rob Clark as part of the Freedreno project.

Qualcomm through their innovation center (QuIC) has been contributing to the open-source DRM/KMS driver for a few months. The work includes new hardware enablement and other changes that have been happily accepted upstream by Rob Clark and worked its way into the mainline Linux kernel.

This MDP driver work and the contributions by QuIC serve as another wonderful success story with Rob originally starting work on the Freedreno work -- the Gallium3D user-space driver and then the DRM/KMS driver to replace Qualcomm's Android kernel driver -- in his spare time while being employed by Texas Instruments (he's since joined Red Hat). With little resources and no initial backing from Qualcomm or other organizations, he's managed to achieve a lot out of this driver that started through (and still to some extent continues) reverse-engineering and has picked up enough traction that Qualcomm/QuIC contributes to the project. Rob's been working on this initiative for about three years.

The most recent patch series from the company is for working on WB / DSI enablement work for this driver with these changes potentially hitting the Linux 4.1 kernel. Aside from the VC4 / Raspberry Pi driver by Eric Anholt who is now employed by Broadcom, there aren't sadly other open-source ARM graphics success stories with achieving mainline kernel support for the DRM/KMS driver and a full-functioning Gallium3D/Mesa driver also as part of the mainline code-base that in turn attracts contributions from the hardware vendor.