Broadcom VC5 DRM Driver Might Soon Be On Its Way To The Mainline Linux Kernel

Eric Anholt believes he is getting quite close to the stage of merging the Broadcom VC5 DRM driver into the mainline Linux kernel tree.

As part of the VC5 open-source driver stack for supporting the next-gen Broadcom VideoCore 5 graphics hardware, there's been the VC5 Gallium3D driver that is already in mainline Mesa for OpenGL support and the VC5 DRM driver that has been outside of the kernel tree up until now. (There's also been the also out-of-tree experimental work on VC5 Vulkan support via BCMV, etc.)

Lead developer Eric Anholt though has mentioned he's getting close to merging the Direct Rendering Manager code. He's gotten the GPU scheduler -- which is making use of the AMDGPU scheduler code -- into good shape. His latest initiative has been working on client isolation support to ensure different clients interacting with the graphics processor aren't able to read/write to each other's memory, etc. Once that important security functionality is worked out, Eric's going to look at mainlining this driver.

This means that potentially for Linux 4.18 or 4.19 we might see the VC5 DRM driver merged. This comes after the driver has been in development for more than one year while so far has just been an Android TV set top box making use of these next-gen Broadcom graphics, but many are hoping for a future Raspberry Pi board making use of VideoCore V.