DRM Changes In Linux 3.11 Might Be The Biggest Ever

The in-kernel DRM graphics driver changes lined up for the Linux 3.11 kernel are possibly the biggest set of Direct Rendering Manager changes ever, but it looks unlikely that the VIA KMS driver will be merged for this release.

David Airlie sent out a mailing list update about the drm-next status. While the Linux 3.10 final kernel still needs to be released and the DRM pull request then submitted, Airlie notes already, "drm-next is pretty big, possibly the biggest ever."

Among the DRM changes to find include:

- The new R-Car DRM driver.

- Lots of Intel driver changes scattered throughout, including Haswell improvements and settling the Bay Trail / Valley View enablement.

- The Radeon DRM driver changes are most apparent to the end-user and include Radeon HD 8000 "Sea Islands" support and most importantly is there's finally dynamic power management in the open-source driver. The changes are fantastic and there's more than 50,000 lines of new code for this AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver.

- Various updates for Tegra and shmob, DRM Core updates, TTM reservation conversion support, some PRIME + GEM patches via Samsung. MGAG200 DRM driver patches, documentation updates, and other random updates.

Still to be merged is the Samsung Exynos driver changes and not yet submitted are the Nouveau changes for the Linux 3.11 kernel, but it doesn't look like the Nouveau re-clocking will be done for the next kernel or anything overly exciting (stay tuned for later Phoronix articles about Nouveau changes).

While the VIA DRM driver is finally going for mainline, there's still some outstanding changes needed before it will be added, per this mailing list message. Hopefully this long-awaited VIA kernel mode-setting driver will come for Linux 3.12.