Intel Publishes Full Linux Driver Support For Cherryview

A few days ago I wrote about Intel adding Cherryview support to their Mesa 3D driver and now waking up this morning they have dropped a huge patch bomb that implements Cherryview Atom support within their DRM kernel driver. We now have a much better understanding for the Cherryview graphics hardware capabilities for when these Atom SoCs begin to ship in some months down the road.

The "Cherryview" Atom processors feature "Gen8" graphics (Broadwell) capabilities, there's three display pipes, three HDMI/DisplayPort/EmbeddedDisplayPort ports, two MIPI DSI display ports, and VGA support has been dropped from Cherryview.

With this set of 71 Intel i915 DRM kernel patches providing the hardware enablement for Cherryview, the Linux graphics support is roughly on par with earlier generations of hardware like Bay Trail.

Most of the new kernel code is for supporting Cherryview's new DisplayPort/HDMI display PHY and handling the third display pipe. With these patches there's also the RC6 and Turbo performance/power-savings support.

These 71 initial kernel patches for supporting Cherryview graphics can be found via the intel-gfx list. It will be exciting to see the power of Broadwell graphics within a low-power Atom SoC, but Cherryview is some months away from shipping. The Cherry Trail SoC platform will be used in tablets while the recently announced Intel Braswell will be used in low-end laptops/PCs. This 14nm "Airmont" shrink of Silvermont is expected in the fourth quarter of this year.