Raspberry Pi To Get Firmware Driver In Linux 4.3, Closer To DRM Driver Support
The Raspberry Pi firmware driver is needed for communicating with the VPU, which in turn has exclusive control of some peripherals. It was Eric Anholt that sent out this RPi firmware driver per this mailing list post.
Eric Anholt after leaving Intel to join Broadcom has been working on the VC4 driver to provide a fully-open graphics driver stack for the Raspberry Pi, via a DRM kernel driver and the VC4 Gallium3D graphics driver.
The VC4 Gallium3D driver has been living within mainline Mesa while the VC4 DRM driver remains outside of the mainline kernel tree. However, now that they're working to mainline the firmware driver, it looks like Broadcom developers are getting closer to upstreaming the kernel Direct Rendering Manager driver. While this firmware driver is being queued for Linux 4.3, as of yet Eric hasn't published any plans for trying to land the DRM driver in Linux 4.3.
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