VIA DRM Kernel Mode-Setting On The OLPC

While the group behind the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) child ended up writing their own VIA Linux graphics driver, which is further fragmenting VIA's nasty Linux situation, James Simmons now has his OpenChrome-based VIA DRM kernel mode-setting driver working from the OLPC hardware.

The developer who had been working on 3Dfx kernel mode-setting support for this vintage graphics hardware had turned his attention to VIA TTM memory management and kernel mode-setting a few months back with VIA Technologies failing to deliver any code in this area and the other VIA Linux communities (e.g. OpenChrome) not actively pursuing the work either.

The VIA TTM/GEM kernel memory code is nearly ready and kernel mode-setting has moved along. None of this code has been merged into the mainline Linux kernel (or the drm-next tree for that matter), but now James has this code working on the VIA-based OLPC notebook too.

James is reporting from his new blog that his drm-openchrome kernel is working with the OLPC VIA graphics. However, the OpenChrome X.Org DDX driver doesn't yet recognize the KMS support properly so the kernel and user-space drivers are currently colliding. This though may not be of any direct benefit to the OLPC crew since their xf86-video-chrome driver is derived from VIA's xf86-video-via DDX and not the OpenChrome driver for which James is targeting.

James has also shared he has resurrected work on his 3Dfx kernel mode-setting tree.