NVIDIA Tegra194 Xavier Gets Plumbed For Open-Source Display Support

With the Linux 4.20 kernel there is the initial display code for NVIDIA's Tegra194 "Xavier" SoC while the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.21, will bring the rest of the display enablement code and enough to light up the HDMI output on the Jetson AGX Xavier.

Thierry Reding of NVIDIA sent out the latest seven patches on Friday for working on the Tegra194 display support. The code includes adding Tegra194 support to the host1x GPU driver (host1x is the DMA engine for register access to Tegra graphics/multimedia modules), Video Image Composer (VIC) support for Tegra194 within the Tegra DRM driver, and enabling display support for Tegra194 via the DeviceTree additions in the kernel.

With the last patch, HDMI support is flipped on for the P2972-0000 part via its DeviceTree file. The NVIDIA P2972-0000 is the Jetson AGX Xavier development board.

I've been testing out the Jetson AGX Xavier and will have my review/benchmarks on it soon. Of course, for the best experience is with the closed-source NVIDIA Linux driver stack in order to utilize CUDA and more. But it's great NVIDIA is contributing in some extent to open-source/Nouveau on the Tegra side. So far though all of their Tegra194 open-source GPU work has been on the display side with the Nouveau/NVC0 code not yet working for this latest Tegra SoC.

The Xavier (T194) SoC as a reminder has eight custom "Carmel" ARM 64-bit cores, a Volta GPU with 512 CUDA cores, and this SoC is manufactured on a 12nm TSMC FinFET process.