V3D DRM Driver Steps Towards Mainline Kernel, Renamed From VC5

The Broadcom VC5 driver stack is being renamed to V3D and developer Eric Anholt is looking at merging it into the mainline Linux kernel.

The VC5 DRM/KMS and Mesa code has been for supporting the next-generation Broadcom VideoCore 5 graphics hardware that's only now beginning to appear in some devices, well, it seems one device so far. Though as I pointed out a few months back, there's already "VC6" activity going on too as the apparent successor to VC5 already being in development.

Anholt has acknowledged this VC5 driver is working on VC6 too, thus he's planning the rename to the more generic "V3D" name to avoid potential confusion.

Eric has pointed out he's still working on security for this driver to ensure clients of the GPU can't access each others memory. But aside from that, he thinks the application binary interface (ABI) is in good shape and is hoping to merge the driver to mainline.

He notes in the patches that he is planning to rename the VC5 Gallium3D driver to V3D too, once this DRM/KMS driver is merged to the mainline Linux kernel tree.