Open-Source DRM Driver Sent Out For The "Good Old" Atari ST/TT/Falcon Systems

As we approach the end of 2022, an initial "request for comments" was sent out this week on a new open-source Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) display driver for supporting Atari systems from the early 90's.

As I wrote about back in July, Geert Uytterhoeven who oversees Linux's Motorola 68000 (m68k) code had been writing a DRM graphics/display driver for old Atari systems with a focus on the Atari ST/TT/Falcon systems. These systems from the early 90's featured Motorola 68000 series processors and a programmable video controller.

Uytterhoeven hasn't been writing this DRM driver on bare metal Atari ST/TT/Falcon hardware but developing it on ARAnyM -- the "Atari Running on Any Machine" emulator. With the RFC patches submitted this week, the development remains focused just on this emulated environment.

Atari Falcon on Wikipedia.

This driver for "the good old Atari ST/TT/Falcon hardware" is just under two thousand lines of new code in its current form. Geert acknowledges it's not yet ready for upstreaming with the mode-setting not yet working reliably and other areas for improvement with the code.

Those curious about this Atari DRM driver work can find it out for review on the mailing list.