VIA DRM Driver Finally Proposed For Mainline Linux

It looks like with the Linux 3.11 kernel there is finally the potential for the VIA DRM graphics driver that's long been in development to enter the mainline kernel source tree.

James Simmons has been working on the VIA DRM driver for years and he's finally ready to submit this Direct Rendering Manager driver into the mainline kernel. After reporting last month he finally has mainline ambitions for the driver he's largely developed by himself as an independent Linux developer, he wrote today, "Here is the first run at inspection of the VIA openchrome dri driver. Now that the Xorg driver has been out over a year with KMS support most people should be able to use this feature. The driver is totally complete but we wanted to merge it so people with newer hardware that has HDMI/DVI-D support can be able to run X windows. Your xorg driver does not implement HDMI/DVI in UMS mode and we don't have the resources to do this work. Basic TTM/GEM is supported but currently you can't run any acceleration with the command queue. Over the next 6 months this should be implemented."

He published the VIA DRM driver onto the mailing list in form of 21 patches. Now one has to wonder if an open-source VIA Gallium3D driver will finally materialize in the coming years... While James' work and commitment can be definitely applauded, for those that haven't ready my earlier VIA Linux articles, VIA x86 hardware should still definitely be avoided.