The Main DRM Pull Hits The Linux 3.4 Kernel

The main DRM graphics pull landed this afternoon for the Linux 3.4 kernel. David Airlie of Red Hat sent in the main DRM pull, which was followed-up by the Radeon HD 7000 / Trinity pull and then an unexpected Nouveau Kepler / de-staging pull. All of the code made it into the kernel, though Linus is complaining about some GCC warnings.

Aside from the separate pulls that add in initial support for the AMD Radeon HD 7000, AMD Fusion "Trinity" APUs, and KMS for NVIDIA GeForce 600 "Kepler" graphics processors, the main 3.4 DRN items include:

- Integration of the DisplayLink UDL KMS driver for the interesting USB-based displays. This KMS driver does support DRM driver hot-plugging.

- DRM core now supports EDID overriding via external firmware, better hot-plug support (as part of the DisplayLink work), and the i2c reads should be twice as fast (quicker EDID parsing)

- Samsung's Exynos driver has lots of work. This work includes HDMI audio support, implementing support for the HDMI 1.4 specification, and virtual output support that could be used from wireless displays. The G2D driver mentioned in the aforelinked article wasn't pulled for the Linux 3.4 kernel citing security concerns with the interface that's exposed to user-space, but it sounds like Samsung will have that fixed up for the Linux 3.5 kernel.

- The GMA500 Poulsbo driver has code clean-ups.

- The Radeon driver has clean-ups, Command Stream Optimizations, StreamOut support, and a page-flipping fix. There's already some early Radeon benchmarks from this drm-next tree.

- The Nouveau driver has NVD9 DisplayPort handling and more re-clocking work.

- The Intel DRM driver re-enables GMBUS, finish GPU patch, missed IRQ fixes, stencil tiling fixes, interlaced support, aliased PPGTT support, swizzling, and semaphore fixes. The Intel improvements can make Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge run faster with this new kernel.

That's about it for key work. Other work is talked about in this earlier Phoronix article. For the 3.4 DRM pull and not in any other special pull yet is the Intel Haswell open-source graphics support or Intel Valleyview support, which is the next-generation Atom SoC that will be using Intel Ivy Bridge graphics rather than cruddy PowerVR graphics powered by a binary blob.

This main DRM pull request for Linux 3.4 can be found on the mailing list and landed this afternoon into the tree of Linus Torvalds.

Besides the new hardware enablement, for the 3.4 cycle David Airlie is also hoping to land some DRM PRIME / DMA-BUF interface code. This isn't anything too exciting for end-users, but rather just infrastructure code. The only driver potentially hooking up to this would be Exynos, but anything else will wait until Linux 3.4 kernel or later.