Raspberry Pi KMS Driver Pull Request Sent For Linux 4.4

Eric Anholt at Broadcom has sent in his Git pull request to land the Raspberry Pi KMS/DRM driver into DRM-Next for in turn entering the mainline Linux 4.4 kernel.

This Broadcom VC4 DRM/KMS driver has been in the works for a while now with the main hardware target being the Raspberry Pi / Raspberry Pi 2. The Broadcom architectures officially supported by this driver are the bcm2835 and bcm2836. While Eric has also been working on a VC4 Gallium3D driver, this VC4 KMS driver being offered up for Linux 4.4 lacks the kernel bits for hardware acceleration as well as power management. There's other out-of-tree code for that, but it's not ready for mainline with Linux 4.4. Thus with Linux 4.4 on the Pi, you'll just get a nice kernel mode-set powered display with a display plane and cursor.

This KMS-only driver in its current form weighs in at just over 3,000 lines of code. Those wishing to learn more about this Raspberry Pi KMS driver that will land in Linux 4.4 -- assuming David Airlie honors this pull request into DRM-Next -- can be found on DRI-devel. You can read our many Raspberry Pi and VC4 articles for more background on this open-source RPi driver work.