Another New KMS Graphics Driver Tips Up

Another new open-source KMS (kernel mode-setting) kernel graphics driver has tipped-up. This time it's for...

The new hardware support this time in a Linux KMS world is for Matrox hardware. Red Hat's David Airlie published an AST KMS driver just days ago for the ASpeed Technologies 2D server graphics chips and now he has another KMS driver for these workstation/server customers -- many of which are running Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The Matrox G200 ASIC has been around going back to 1998.

The "MGAG200" KMS driver supports the G200 server engine chips but currently none of the Matrox G-series desktop graphics cards. In particular, the driver is binding right now to G200 SE A/B, G200EV, G200WB, G200EH, and G200ER ASICs. The open-source driver itself is based upon the design of the AST driver along with earlier work done by Matthew Garrett. Like the ASpeed KMS driver, no user-space graphics driver is planned but these KMS-enabled graphics processors are just intended to be used with the generic xf86-video-modesetting DDX driver.

This new driver is just under 4,000 lines of code and is likely a candidate for merging into the Linux 3.5 kernel. The code for now can be found on the dri-devel mailing list.