OpenChrome DRM Continues To Be Developed, But It Didn't Make It Mainline This Year

The OpenChrome DRM driver continues to largely be developed by one community contributor left standing for supporting VIA x86 graphics on the Linux desktop. These VIA graphics chipsets haven't been too common in about a decade, but OpenChrome continues persevering with working to deliver a full-functioning, open-source driver that VIA itself was never able to produce.

Kevin Brace is the main contributor left working on OpenChrome in 2017. He presented back during XDC2017 about his work on OpenChrome. He does hope to one day see this VIA DRM driver mainlined into the Linux kernel, but it's not there yet with the code not being mature enough, relying upon legacy DRM interfaces rather than the newer atomic APIs, and is based against older Linux kernel code-bases rather than the upstream tip. Besides the Direct Rendering Manager driver, he's also been maintaining the xf86-video-openchrome driver that does continue to support user-space mode-setting too. Eventually he also still hopes to support 2D/3D/video acceleration with the stack.

Those still using VIA x86 hardware with integrated graphics, the DRM continues to be developed out of drm-openchrome. His Linux 3.19-based kernel continues to be actively developed the most while his newer Linux 4.13 kernel code isn't touched as frequently: that 4.13-based kernel not in six weeks and is at DRM OpenChrome v3.0.57 compared to the v3.19 kernel on 3.0.70.

Anyhow, we'll see where DRM OpenChrome heads in 2018.