VIA Kernel Mode-Setting Code Might Merge Soon

Posted by Michael Larabel on June 30, 2012

It looks like the VIA kernel mode-setting (KMS) code may soon go mainline.

Friday afternoon on the VIA OpenChrome mailing list, James Simmons released a new VIA OpenChrome KMS snapshot. This was version xf86-video-openchrome-0.2.999-pre20120629.

What makes this snapshot actually exciting is what he says in the mailing list message: "I merged trunk into the kms_branch so this is the last testing before it becomes trunk itself. Please test."

So James has re-based the mainline OpenChrome code with his KMS work on top and plans to merge this to the mainline xf86-video-openchrome code-base in the future. In other words, Simmons' KMS activities will no longer be in some separate branch but will be mainline within the OpenChrome DDX. This will hopefully be greeted then by the mainlining of his DRM/KMS driver changes in the Linux kernel. VIA KMS might actually materialize in mainline.

While VIA hardware in the marketplace continues to diminish, it's fascinating to finally see the kernel mode-setting support advance. This comes after VIA abandoned their open-source strategy and failed to really do anything else.

James Simmons has been pretty much single-handedly writing the VIA KMS driver with TTM/GEM support. VIA Technologies is barely doing anything these days for the Linux driver community and the OpenChrome development community is nearly dead aside from James.

He's been working on this VIA KMS code for more than the past year and a half while frequently releasing updates in the long development process.

OpenChrome support has lagged but back in February Simmons had an OpenChrome KMS goal of this summer. It looks like this may come to fruition. Originally though he hoped for the xf86-video-openchrome 0.3.0 KMS-enabled driver release by the beginning of June. After the KMS-enabled driver is released and out in the wild is when he wants to push the DRM code into the kernel. UMS support will continue to work for those without kernel mode-setting support.

VIA KMS is not likely for Linux 3.6 kernel and might even be out of the question for Linux 3.7, but it's good to see Simmons' dedication and work continuing. Hopefully in 2013 there will be mainline support within distributions for VIA kernel mode-setting for those unfortunate souls still stuck with VIA x86 hardware.

Too bad though that there still is not any working Gallium3D driver for VIA hardware. As of late, VIA is just playing around with ARM hardware and Android.

Discuss this article in our forums, IRC channel, or email the author. You can also follow our content via RSS and on social networks like Facebook, Identi.ca, and Twitter (@Phoronix and @MichaelLarabel). Subscribe to Phoronix Premium to view our content without advertisements, view entire articles on a single page, and experience other benefits.
Latest Hardware Reviews
  1. Sumo Lounge Emperor
  2. Gallium3D Continues Improving OpenGL For Older Radeon GPUs
  3. 15-Way Open vs. Closed Source NVIDIA/AMD Linux GPU Comparison
  4. Nouveau vs. NVIDIA Linux Comparison Shows Shortcomings
Latest Software Articles
  1. Intel Linux OpenGL Driver Leading Over Apple OS X
  2. The Cost Of Ubuntu Disk Encryption
  3. Btrfs vs. EXT4 vs. XFS vs. F2FS On Linux 3.10
  4. AMD Radeon R600 GPU LLVM 3.3 Back-End Testing
Latest Linux News
  1. KDE 4.11 Will Be The Last Major KDE4 Workspaces Feature Release
  2. New NVIDIA Linux Driver Supports The GeForce GTX 780
  3. Chrome 28 To Offer More Speed Improvements
  4. Digia Announces "Boot To Qt" Project
  5. X.Org Libraries Hit By Round Of Security Issues
  6. Wayland's Weston Gets Output Scaling Support
  7. Raspberry Pi Gets New Wayland Weston Renderer
  8. Debian GNU/Hurd 2013 Release Brings New Packages
  9. Intel Ultrabook Performance Is Faster With Mesa 9.2
  10. Hot Relocation HDD To SSD Support For Btrfs
  11. Phoronix Test Suite 4.6.0 "Utsira" Released
Latest Forum Talk
  1. Radeon 7770 Can't reclock crash kernel
  2. Digia Announces "Boot To Qt" Project
  3. X.Org Libraries Hit By Round Of Security Issues
  4. Xserver 1.14 support will arrive with Catalyst...
  5. New NVIDIA Linux Driver Supports The GeForce GTX...
  6. Fedora 18 Comes To ARMv6, Raspberry Pi
  1. Computers
  2. Display Drivers
  3. Graphics Cards
  4. Motherboards
  5. Peripherals
  6. Processors
  7. Software
  8. Operating Systems
  9. All Articles
  1. Linux Benchmarking
  2. OpenBenchmarking.org
  3. Phoronix Test Suite