VIA Releases Chrome 9 Series DRM

A month ago VIA had published 2D and 3D documentation (along with video register guides) for some of their newer IGPs and they had also announced a partnership with the OpenChrome project. As we have come to find out, some OpenChrome developers are under NDA with VIA Technologies already and they'll be looking at improving their ASIC support, delivering RandR 1.2 support, and making other fundamental improvements to this open-source VIA X.Org driver. Today though VIA has stepped forward once more and they have now released the DRM code for their Chrome 9 series.

Through a set of three patches published on the DRI mailing list, VIA's Bruce Chang published the Direct Rendering Manager code that will be required for bringing up 3D support on the Chrome 9 IGPs. This Chrome 9 DRM amounts to about 5,000 lines of code and should build against the Linux 2.6.28 kernel. This code will likely enter the Linux 2.6.29 kernel permitting that the initial feedback from the kernel / X.Org developers is incorporated quickly.

Among the Chrome 9 chipsets from VIA are the CN896, K8M890CE/K8N890CE, P4M900, and VN896. This DRM is the first step of the puzzle in enabling open-source 3D support for VIA hardware, with the next step being the Mesa code.