Proposal: A DRM SoC Framework

A German developer is seeking comments on patches he's written to create a DRM SoC framework for the Linux kernel.

Thierry Reding published a patch series on Friday to create an initial framework to better handle ARM SoCs with the DRM/KMS sub-system. The patches provide an actual framework plus a basic skeleton driver to show how to use this proposed DRM/SoC API.

As far as the need to create a new framework focused upon these ARM System-on-a-Chips, "The reason for implementing this is that the approach currently used by many SoC DRM drivers is to instantiate a dummy platform device for the DRM driver to bind against, which is somewhat of a kludge. The proposal in this series takes care of this implicitly and instantiates only what is really needed to make the DRM core happy."

The commit message goes on to describe:

This commit adds an initial framework that can be used to plug SoC graphics devices into the DRM/KMS subsystem.

SoCs often don't have a dedicated device to which a DRM driver can bind, but instead the graphics complex typically consists of several platform-type devices that work together. The DRM SoC support code therefore adds a dummy device that is associated with the DRM driver, which typically provides some kind of API for other drivers to register with.

The patches in the RFC state can be found on the dri-devel list. So far no other DRM developers have commented on these patches.