NVIDIA Sends Out DRM Display Patches For Tegra's Xavier SoC

Going back to the beginning of the year NVIDIA developers have been contributing "Tegra194" enablement to the upstream Linux kernel. They've now moved on to contributing T194 support to the Tegra Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver for display support on this SoC that's better known as Xavier.

The Tegra194 / Xavier is NVIDIA's latest SoC with the eight Carmel ARMv8 cores and Volta-based GPU. The NVIDIA Xavier Developer Kits have begun shipping and now with all of the other necessary hardware enablement bits upstream or on their way to mainline, the latest patches being published are for the display support with the Tegra DRM driver.

Thierry Reding of NVIDIA this morning sent out an initial five patches that end up adding the Tegra194 support to the different areas of this GPU DRM driver. It appears to be enough to get display support going but not any GPU hardware acceleration.

These Tegra DRM patches will potentially be mainlined with the upcoming Linux 4.20~5.0 kernel cycle. It's on the Tegra side where NVIDIA actively contributes patches like these given customer interest in open-source display drivers while on the desktop GPU side is where the bulk of the work is left up to the independent, community contributors. The Tegra open-source support has turned out quite well in the past and looks to be continuing with Xavier, but for any real use-cases the NVIDIA proprietary driver is still best in order to have CUDA/cuDNN/OpenCL and other functionality not possible on the current Tegra+Nouveau open-source stack.