Raspberry Pi Zero Will Likely Be Supported On Linux 4.9

It's looking like the Raspberry Pi Zero might be playing fine out-of-the-box with the upcoming Linux 4.9 kernel cycle.

Eric Anholt posted his weekly VC4 driver status/changes. In there the Intel-turned-Broadcom developer commented, "Finally, I landed Stefan Wahren's Raspberry Pi Zero devicetree for upstream. If nothing goes wrong, the Zero should be supported in 4.9."

Thus right now the Pi Zero DeviceTree file is in place for supporting the board alongside the BCM2835 Raspberry Pi A+ / B. The DT for it isn't too remarkable but just a "minified version" of the Raspberry Pi Model A+ while not having a power LED and inverting the activity LED.

Great to see the Raspberry Pi Zero finally approaching a happy state on the mainline Linux kernel...

When it comes to the open-source VC4 graphics driver stack for the Pi devices, Eric Anholt made various fixes to the driver over the past week. Eric also sent in a drm-vc4-next pull request for Linux 4.9 with a reduction in CPU and memory overhead for 3D rendering along with interlaced vblank timing.