Intel Valley View Support Continues To Mature

While it's been a number of days since mentioning anything on Intel's forthcoming Valley View Atom SoC, the open-source graphics driver support continues to mature.

Patches continue to flow onto public mailing lists and the respective Git repositories by Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers enabling hardware support for the next-generation Atom SoC under Linux. For those living under a rock, what makes this Atom so exciting is that it does away with Imagination's PowerVR SGX graphics and instead uses Intel's in-house Core/HD graphics derived from Ivy Bridge. This means nice open-source graphics driver support rather than dealing with the notorious PowerVR Linux drivers going back to the cringing Poulsbo.

One of the latest "VLV" patch-sets is from Vijay Purushothaman for enabling all display interfaces. The set of nine patches allow for all display interfaces on Valley View to work under Linux, such as HDMI, DisplayPort, and Embedded DisplayPort (eDP). The patch-set also enables multi-display support.

These patches go against the Intel DRM driver and will hopefully be merged into the Linux 3.7 kernel. While Valley View patches have been hitting the respective Git repositories for months, on the kernel side it looks like the support is still being primed and it will be 3.7+ where the support really takes shape and up to the expectation of end-users.