A New DRM Driver Is Coming To Linux 3.11 Kernel

Beyond the exciting Radeon DRM driver changes that includes the long-awaited dynamic power management support and also initial support for the HD 8000 "Sea Islands" hardware, there will also be a new DRM driver to premiere with the Linux 3.11 kernel.

The new Direct Rendering Manager driver that's been pulled into drm-next for merging into the Linux 3.11 kernel is for the Renesas R-Car SoC. The Renesas R-Car is an ARM Cortex-A9 quad-core SoC used for high-end car "infotainment" systems. The graphics on this car infotainment SoC are powered by a PowerVR SGX543MP2 graphics core, but Renesas has its own display unit and 2D graphics processor.

This new DRM driver is just shy of 3,000 lines of code and enables the Renesas R-Car Display Unit with all eight planes in RGB/YUV formats with alpha blending. VGA and LVDS encoders are also supported. Of course, this is only about the display portion and not the PowerVR 3D graphics on the hardware. Regardless, it's great to see more open-source ARM DRM drivers reaching the mainline Linux kernel.

This Renesas DRM driver has been in development for a while now by Laurent Pinchart. The code, which was pushed into drm-next just hours ago, can be found in this Git commit.