Linux Display Driver Worked On For A Popular & Low-Cost RISC-V SoC

The "v1" patches were posted today for a new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver to be used for display purposes with the StarFive JH7110, a low-cost RISC-V SoC found in the VisionFive boards, PINE64 Star64, and other low-cost RISC-V single board computers.

This DRM driver supports the GEM memory management framework and is enough to get the display controller with HDMI display working with the JH7110 SoC. There were earlier patches for this driver while now today are marked as "v1 v1". This driver is being worked on by StarFive Tech engineers directly.

This driver is just about kernel mode-setting (KMS) and buffer management for display purposes and does not provide any 2D or 3D hardware acceleration. The JH7110 relies on VeriSilicon / Innosilicon IP for the display controller.

Those interested in learning more can see this patch series for this latest DRM driver code.

It's great seeing all the upstream-focused activity by StarFive around the JH7110 SoC that has proved to be quite popular due to its low-cost and making its way into many RISC-V single board computer designs. The JH7110 features four U74 processor cores up to 1.5GHz with a 2MB L2 cache plus StarFive ISP, Vision DSP, and a StarFive Neural Network Engine. Other portions of the StarFive JH7100 series support has also been upstreamed in recent kernel cycles while hopefully this DRM display driver will be fit enough for mainlining soon.