A New Open-Source KMS Driver Just Published

Embedded GPUs on Linux are a big mess due to their lack of fully open-source drivers, memory management complications, and other technical issues. However, there is some good news to report today and that's on the emergence of a new open-source KMS driver.

Sascha Hauer, a German developer, has presented to the DRI development list a brand new open-source KMS driver. This is the initial KMS driver for the Freescale i.MX51 and i.MX53 SoCs. Freescale's i.MX51 is a low-end SoC targeted for Google Chrome OS netbooks and the like while the i.MX53 is a much more powerful chip with better graphics capabilities.

While there is this driver now available, right now it doesn't do anything beyond kernel mode-setting. There is not yet any user-space Gallium3D / Mesa driver nor is there proper GEM/TTM memory management support. This Freescale KMS driver is just similar to the open-source GMA500 Poulsbo driver that provides KMS support, but not much more.

The i.MX51/53 driver isn't yet ready to be merged into the mainline Linux kernel, but Sascha says it's far enough along where he's seeking comments from other developers.