Samsung Exynos4 DRM Driver To Be Merged Soon

It looks like the Samsung Exynos4 DRM driver that first publicly appeared in August will soon be merged into the mainline Linux kernel as the first open-source DRM driver within the kernel for an ARM SoC.

For weeks it's been looking like it would be merged, and now there's final confirmation that as soon as next week David Airlie (the Linux kernel DRM maintainer and Red Hat employee) could pull the code into his "-next" tree.

The Samsung graphics driver has gone through a number of public revisions already and David Airlie mentions in a new email he will likely give it one more review next week. "I'll probably give it one more review early next week, but I might merge it to -next, if I don't find anything seriously wrong."

The Exynos 4210 driver might make it into the DRM tree, but it's not full-featured and doesn't have an open-source 3D user-space. However, this open kernel code doesn't expose any bits to be used by a closed-source user-space, which is why this driver is likely to be merged where as past ARM graphics efforts have largely failed.

This Samsung Exynos DRM driver would be a feature of the Linux 3.2 kernel.