Raspberry Pi 5 Kernel Graphics Driver Support Will Hopefully Be Upstreamed Soon

While the Raspberry Pi 5 debuted last September, the mainline Linux kernel support for this popular single board computer continues to lag behind the state of Raspberry Pi's downstream kernel. SUSE has been working to upstream various Raspberry Pi 5 driver support while now Raspberry Pi engineers have also begun the trek toward upstreaming their kernel graphics driver support.

Dave Stevenson of the Raspberry Pi crew sent out a set of preparatory patches today for the Broadcom BCM2712 SoC support as used by the Raspberry Pi 5. The set of 31 patches submitted today are various fixes they have been carrying in their downstream kernel for a while. These patches in turn also make some infrastructure improvements that will help in facilitate their upstreaming of the BCM2712 support.

Raspberry Pi developers are finalizing their BCM2712 / Raspberry Pi 5 support patches for the VC4 Direct Rendering Manager driver and hope to have those actual support patches "fairly soon".

The 31 prep patches out today touch around 500 lines of code in the VC4 driver. Here's to hoping more of the Raspberry Pi 5 support will be upstreamed before this board celebrates its first birthday.