VC4 Stepping Closer To Feature Parity With Original Raspberry Pi Driver

The open-source VC4 driver stack with DRM/KMS driver and Gallium3D driver for the Raspberry Pi hardware continues stepping closer to feature parity with the original binary blob graphics driver, particularly when it comes to mode-setting related functionality.

Broadcom developer Eric Anholt wrote a new blog post today concerning the latest improvements on the VC4 front. Recent highlights include pulling the VEC SDTV support into the Linux 4.10 kernel on top of the other VC4 DRM 4.10 changes, DSI panel support is finally working after nine months of development, and more. The DSI driver along with related work should come for Linux 4.11 along with other improvements. Work is also ongoing for getting the HDMI audio code working as well as VC4 driver interoperability with media decoding.

Eric concluded with this pre-Christmas blog post with, "I feel like we're now making rapid progress toward feature parity on the modesetting side of the VC4 driver."

Hopefully in 2017 we'll see the Raspberry Pi VC4 driver advance in the remaining areas to become a better driver than the original binary driver for these low-cost ARM SBCs.