The Samsung Exynos 7870 Octa SoC released back in 2016 on a 14nm process and powered by eight Arm Cortex-53 cores and a Mali T830 GPU. Finally now for late 2025 there is open-source display driver happenings going mainline for this aging SoC.
Submitted today via the drm-misc-next pull request to DRM-Next ahead of Linux 6.18 is the DSIM bridge driver support for the Exynos 7870. This is for the MIPI DSI (Display Serial Interface) support with this particular SoC.
Sent in today as well via the exynos-drm-next pull request is the glue layer code around the Exynos 7870 DSIM support in the Exynos DSI driver.
This work around the display support for the Exynos 7870 SoC has been ongoing the past few months by open-source developer Kaustabh Chakraborty. The work in turn is based on analyzing Samsung’s vendor kernel sources. This Samsung Exynos 7870 DSIM support has been tested with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy J7 Prime, Samsung Galaxy A2 Core, and Samsung Galaxy J6 with DSI panels. With this code now working its way to DRM-Next, it should in turn premiere in the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel.