ASpeed Preparing AST2600 DisplayPort Support

Going back two years already ASpeed developers have been working on prepping AST2600 support for Linux, their seventh generation server management processor / BMC. The latest open-source driver activity points to the AST2600 having DisplayPort support.

The AST2600 is the successor to the widely-used AST2500. The AST2600 makes its claim of being the world's first BMC SoC on a 28nm process and is powered by a dual-core Arm Cortex A7.

Seemingly not being widely talked about is DisplayPort support with the AST2600, though we imagine many server vendors will continue sticking to VGA outputs. We have seen some mentions of "aspeed,ast2600-displayport" references and the like in DeviceTree files and other patches, while out today is a DRM/KMS driver patch explicitly working on that DisplayPort support for the AST2600.

This patch builds off other recent AST2600 display work for ASpeed's open-source and upstream "AST" DRM driver. With that patch there is DisplayPort connectivity added in initial form for the Linux kernel.

Here's to hoping it won't take too many years before DisplayPort supplants VGA connections in the data center.