i.MX DRM Support Called For Staging

The driver developer responsible for the i.MX Image Processing Unit DRM driver has called for it to be ultimately pushed into the Linux kernel but first via the kernel's staging area.

In June of 2011 I wrote about a new open-source KMS driver for supporting the Freescale i.MX51 and i.MX53 SoCs. This driver was written by Sascha Hauer of the German-based Pengutronix. Freescale's i.MX51 is a low-end SoC targeted for Google Chrome OS netbooks and the like while the i.MX53 is a much more powerful chip with better graphics capabilities. This i.MX driver was worked on over the summer of 2011 but never ended up being merged into the kernel.

While out of the mainline tree, Sascha has continued working on the i.MX driver and this past April he sought after improving Linux DRM for embedded systems.

In a new mailing list message from Thursday, Sascha is again seeking comments on his i.MX driver and he hopes it will be pushed into the Linux kernel staging area. "I think we have now come to a point where this code needs more public exposure and where it's easier to talk in incremental changes instead of blobs. Therefore I request this to go to staging for some cycles. This would allow us to have something in mainline as a base for further discussion while still being able to change bigger amounts of the driver without breaking officially supported features."

As far as the Freescale i.MX driver's features, "The IPU driver generally works on i.MX51, i.MX53 and i.MX6. The latter has two IPUs, the driver is able to handle them both. This series only contains the IPU driver. There are some additional glue code patches necessary. Also necessary are two drm CMA/GEM helper patches currently waiting for review on dri-devel...The branch contains board support for the i.MX51 babbage (both digital and analog DVI outputs are supported) and i.MX6q armadillo2 (HDMI)."

This i.MX IPU DRM driver will likely be a candidate for the Linux 3.6 kernel.