Armada, VIA DRM Not For The Linux 3.11 Kernel

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 1 July 2013 at 11:20 AM EDT. 1 Comment
FREE SOFTWARE
While we have known the VIA DRM/KMS driver would likely not be merged for Linux 3.11, the Armada DRM ARM driver also isn't going to be merged for this next kernel release.

The VIA DRM driver isn't yet ready with the patches going through review and needing to make some adjustments, which James Simmons still appears committed to seeing through and having his Direct Rendering Manager driver make it into the mainline tree.

Meanwhile, the Armada DRM driver also isn't ready and it isn't clear if there's enough motivation to get it mainlined. The Armada DRM display driver was written by Russell King, a well-known ARM Linux kernel developer, for the Marvell Armada 510 ARM SoCs. The driver supports multiple contiguous scanout buffers, shm-backed cacheable buffer objects for Vivante GPU acceleration, video overlays, and page-flipping.

While Russell has already pushed this Armada DRM driver through a few revisions in the past few weeks, he's facing criticism from DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie over his patches. It appears Russell isn't too committed to seeing the driver merged, but if not, at least it could be picked up by OLPC developers or others who have a stake in Marvell Linux SoC support.

More information on the Armada DRM driver can be found out from the v4 patch series. At least the VIA DRM driver will hopefully be ready by Linux 3.12.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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