Linux 5.3 Kernel To Bring Ingenic KMS Driver, Rockchip RK3328 Support

A final set of drm-misc-next Direct Rendering Manager driver changes were sent out at the end of last week as the remaining feature work now queued up for the upcoming Linux 5.3 kernel merge window.

A new DRM/KMS driver coming with Linux 5.3 is the Ingenic KMS/DRM driver for supporting the Ingenic JZ47xx SoC hardware. This is intended to replace the existing Linux frame-buffer driver for the same hardware.

For Linux 5.3 the driver is quite basic but there are plans by its developer to support multiple planes, IPU integration for colorspace conversion, up/down scaling, support for DSI displays, and TV-out / HDMI outputs.

Ingenic SoCs feature the MIPS instruction set and for the 3D engine feature Vivante graphics. This DRM/KMS driver is about the display portion while it will be interesting to see how well this setup will work with the Etnaviv open-source Vivante driver for 3D. These Ingenic JZ47xx SoCs are all several years old and their most advanced one in the family is fabbed at 40nm and clocked at just 1.2GHz, so don't expect too much from the performance, while that particular one also bundles in PowerVR SGX graphics.

Anyhow, should you be using any Ingenic SoCs, there is this KMS driver coming to replace its FB driver. The drm-misc-next update also adds Rockchip RK3228 SoC support to the Rockchip DRM driver, a new ioctl around DMA-BUF set name, exposing of experimental Panfrost performance counters for Arm hardware, and various other fixes to the different pieces in the DRM subsystem.

The Linux 5.3 merge window will be opening in early July to officially start this next kernel cycle.