Linux 5.10 To Bring Support For Matrox G200 Desktop Graphics Cards

Sporting AGP, fabbed on a 350nm process, making use of a 64-bit memory interface, and clocking to nearly 100MHz, the Matrox G200 desktop graphics cards are set to see mainline open-source support come Linux 5.10.

Yes, the 20+ year old Matrox G200 series desktop parts are finally seeing working Direct Rendering Manager driver support to support kernel mode-setting on Linux.

Earlier this summer I wrote about a SUSE engineer working on Linux MGAG200 driver support for the G200 desktop cards as to date the mainline kernel driver has supported the G200 chips just found on server motherboards. SUSE has been carrying the G200 desktop chip support out-of-tree support for years but is finally being mainlined.

This includes being able to drive a display off the G200 desktop AGP graphics cards, GEM memory management changes that are required to the existing code, and other alterations so this open-source DRM driver works on both the embedded chips found on server boards as well as desktop graphics cards. SUSE has successfully tested the patches with a G200 graphics card running not only GNOME Shell on X.Org but also Wayland's Weston.

The G200 desktop support was sent in as part of drm-misc-next as material ultimately set to be mainlined this October for Linux 5.10.