Sent out today was the first DRM-Misc-Next pull request to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.18 merge window opening around early October. There are a number of smaller DRM graphics driver improvements ready as well as continued work around the accelerator “accel” drivers for the increasing number of NPUs in devices.
Today’s first drm-misc-next pull for the Linux 6.18 cycle includes now defaulting to using the NVIDIA GSP firmware by the Nouveau driver. As explained in that earlier article, the GSP firmware is the better option over the prior signed firmware published by NVIDIA. This change affects Turing and Ampere GPUs and should lead to a better experience for open-source NVIDIA users in just defaulting to the GSP firmware rather than leaving it an option.
The other notable change in drm-misc-next is merging the Rocket driver as the open-source, reverse-engineered Rockchip NPU driver. Tomeu Vizoso has been working on this Rockchip NPU accelerator driver for a while now and is all in good shape for upstreaming to the mainline kernel with Linux 6.18. There is also user-space support ready to go for Mesa 25.3 atop the Teflon framework. Great seeing Rocket join the upstream and growing accelerator subsystem area under the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) umbrella.
Today’s drm-misc-next pull request also has improvements for the AMDXDNA accelerator driver for the Ryzen AI NPUs. The AMDXDNA driver has support now for buffers allocated by user-space, streamlines the power management interfaces, and various fixes.
The DRM panel code with this pull request adds support to panel-edp for MediaTek MT8189 Chromebooks and the panel-simple driver adds support for the Olimex LCD-OLinuXino-5CTS. The Broadcom / Raspberry Pi V3D driver adds support meanwhile for being able to query the number of GPU resets for the KHR_robustness extension.
More details on the initial batch of drm-misc-next changes aligning for Linux 6.18 via this pull request.
