ASpeed DRM Driver Adding DMA-BUF/PRIME Sharing For Use With Servers Having dGPUs

The ASpeed "AST" DRM driver that is for use with ASpeed BMCs on server platforms for display capabilities is preparing to see DMA-BUF and PRIME sharing support. This is useful so the ASpeed BMC can see the screen contents even if the server is relying on a discrete GPU rather than the baseboard management controller's monitor output.

A patch has been in the works to enable DMA-BUF/PRIME buffer sharing support for the ASpeed AST driver in the Linux kernel. The intention with it is all about offloading of reendering in one direction and outputss in the other.

"This patch is designed to solve the problem that the AST is not displayed when the server plug in a discrete graphics card at the same time. We call the dirty callback function to copy the rendering results of the discrete graphics card to the ast side by dma-buf."

This post has the latest patch currently undergoing review if this is of interest to you for server use-cases with dedicated GPUs.