Linux 5.2 DRM Makes Icelake Production-Ready, Adds Lima & Panfrost Drivers

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem and driver updates have now been submitted and merged for the in-development Linux 5.2 kernel.

On the driver front, this is the kernel bringing the reverse-engineered, community-developed Panfrost and Lima DRM/KMS drivers. Panfrost is the driver for ARM Mali Bifrost and Midgard graphics processors while Lima is for the older Mali 400/450 series. Panfrost is in particularly great shape and pairs with the new mainline Mesa Gallium3D driver of the same name for offering decent OpenGL acceleration on a fully open-source driver stack. It's nice to see Arm Mali hardware finally being "freed" on the mainline Linux kernel by the community.

Another new DRM driver added for Linux 5.2 is the ASpeed AST2500 SoC DRM driver. The VirtualBox "vboxvideo" driver has also been promoted out of staging this cycle with it now being cleaned up the past few cycles.

The Intel DRM driver meanwhile considers its Gen11/Icelake support to now be production-ready and is no longer hidden behind an experimental flag. Their OpenGL/Vulkan driver support for Gen11 graphics is also now considered feature-complete. In addition to Icelake, Linux 5.2 brings the IDs for Intel Elkhart Lake graphics support.

Not Gen11, but the Intel DRM driver also adds Comet Lake graphics support. On the AMDGPU front, the Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) code is now used for user pointer "userptr" handling, Vega 20 SMU11 support, various other Vega 20 additions, FreeSync improvements, timeline sync object support, and other display improvements.

A list of the other DRM changes including for the smaller DRM/KMS drivers can be found via the Git merge.