Raspberry Pi 4 V3D Open-Source Kernel Driver Support Slated For Linux 5.20

While the Raspberry Pi 4 has been out for nearly three years, only with the Linux 5.20 kernel later this summer is there anticipated to be the upstream open-source support within the V3D Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver.

The Raspberry Pi 4 V3D enablement patches have been iterated a lot on recently and the enablement code looks like it will be mainlined for Linux 5.20 later this summer. Queued up this week from DRM-Misc-Next and submitted to DRM-Next for v5.20 is the V3D DRM driver patch for enabling the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC that is used by the Raspberry Pi 4.

There is still the DeviceTree patches around the BCM2711 support for the V3D graphics/display driver to be submitted to the kernel via its separate area. But given the V3D driver support for the Raspberry Pi 4 SoC now queued up, it's fairly safe to assume the other remaining patches will be upstreamed too in Linux 5.20.

Peter Robinson commented of the V3D support testing in the patch series, "I've tested this using mesa 22.0.x and Wayland/Gnome on Fedora 36, it's more or less stable with basic testing."

Raspberry Pi 4 within the CooliPi 4B.

The support was submitted as part of this week's drm-misc-next pull. There is also various DRM core fixes, AMDGPU build fixes, and fixes to the other smaller drivers.

This week's pull to DRM-Next also includes "logicvc" as a new DRM driver. This new DRM driver is for supporting the LogiCVC display controller. This is a programmable logic controller designed for use on the Xilinx Zynq 7000 SoCs and other Xilinx FPGAs. This LogiCVC display controller DRM driver was worked on by consulting firm Bootlin.