SimpleDRM Driver Gets A Major Rewrite

David Herrmann has announced his latest work on his SimpleDRM driver plan for the Linux kernel along with a new sysfb concept. These latest eleven patches are considered a "major rewrite" of the earlier SimpleDRM code.

SimpleDRM is aiming to be a rather generic and simple DRM driver for the mainline Linux kernel. SimpleDRM doesn't do hardware acceleration but can replace multiple existing frame-buffer drivers like efifb, vesafb, simplefb, and other code. This basic DRM driver can then work with the xf86-video-modesetting X.Org driver but there isn't yet any support for using this DRM driver on Wayland-based systems.

SimpleDRM has been a project of David's going back to last summer and had undergone several revisions before going through this latest major rewrite.

The new SimpleDRM sysfb work allows registering firmware-framebuffers wirth the system as platform devices so that they can be properly bounded to a single kernel driver. This sysfb implementation though can allow passing of the unaccelerated driver support over to a real hardware driver e.g. going from SimpleDRM to the i915 Intel KMS driver without a reboot.

David Herrmann has tested out the new SimpleDRM driver against a range of graphics hardware and system configurations and so far it's working great, according to his reports. The new SimpleDRM patches can be found on the dri-devel list as it's unlikely we will see the work ready and merged for the Linux 3.14 kernel.