BCM2711 / Raspberry Pi 4 Support Still Being Worked On For Open-Source Display Driver

With the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel merge window one of the features you still won't find in the mainline kernel is the VC4 DRM kernel driver supporting the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC and in turn the Raspberry Pi 4 open-source display support.

Going back to February have been the VC4 DRM patches for the BCM2711 / Raspberry Pi 4. Sent out today is the third iteration of those patches albeit too late for seeing it hit DRM-Next in time for Linux 5.8.

There are 105 patches to bring-up the Broadcom BCM2711 display pipeline in the VC4 driver for the Raspberry Pi 4. Due to having two HDMI controllers and other changes, a significant rework is needed to prep the driver for this newer SoC.

With the v3 patches the code has been re-based against the newer state of the kernel and there are a variety of fixes. Hopefully this VC4 work will get squared away in time for the Linux 5.9 cycle later in the calendar year while at least the rest of the Raspberry Pi 4 VideoCore GPU upstream support is squared away.