VIA Rolls Out Chrome 9 DRM, Pushes For Kernel

It has been a while since we last had any major to report on VIA with their open-source efforts, but this morning they have finally published DRM code that supports their Chrome 9 IGP hardware. The announcement regarding this new Chrome 9 DRM was made on the dri-devel list and was made up of three patches.

This new Direct Rendering Manager code from VIA amounts to about 5,000 lines of C code and about 1,500 lines of code for the header files. Of course, this DRM alone isn't too useful without a Mesa driver to take advantage of it. VIA previously expressed interest in a Gallium3D driver for the Chrome 9, but as of yet no code has been released for a Gallium3D driver or a traditional Mesa driver. It was back in January that Tungsten Graphics published a new DRM and Mesa driver for older VIA hardware.

VIA is looking to get this Chrome 9 DRM upstream within the Linux kernel, but some parts of it have already come under scrutiny by the DRM maintainer, David Airlie. However, we will likely see this new DRM kernel in the Linux 2.6.32 kernel at the latest. There are several different VIA chipsets that use the Chrome 9 integrated graphics processor and among them are the CN896, K8M890CE/K8N890CE, P4M900, and VN896.