On Sep 28 2026, Laurent Pinchart wrote:
> Hi Maxime,
>
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2026 at 06:22:00PM +0200, Maxime Ripard wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Panels in general, and MIPI-DSI panels in particular, are pretty
> > difficult to support and require pretty much a panel driver for each
> > panel produced. Most of them are pretty simple, and require an opaque
> > initialization sequence that is usually poorly documented.
> >
> > This creates a tension between OEMs and distros because OEMs will
> > typically get a new panel to react to a sourcing issue during
> > production, and thus need some swift turnaround between getting their
> > new panel and it being operational in the OS. Distributions on the other
> > hand can take years to ship a kernel with that new panel driver.
> >
> > To solve this, I followed the example of HID-BPF and wrote a panel
> > driver that will rely on BPF programs to perform the panel
> > initialization. That way, we can ship the programs separately from the
> > kernel, and with a different lifecycle. If this driver is accepted, the
> > plan is to have a userspace component started by udev to identify and
> > load the right BPF program for the panels found on the device.
>
> Interesting idea.
>
> How would that work for devices that want early display support ? In
Brain fart... Include a bpf VM in the bootloader? :)
> particular, how does it interact with your recent work on "fastboot"
> support (with the kernel drivers taking over a running display
> configured by the boot loader) ?
>
> I'm also wondering about the incentives for vendors to upstream the
> code. How will we avoid having a proliferation of out-of-tree drivers ?
My 2 cents here from the HID-BPF point of view:
- as mentioned in my reply to Neil, the kernel enforce GPL licensed BPF
only
- so vendors have to publish their code somewhere
- in HID-BPF, I decided to provide an "official" list of HID-BPF sources
as part of the kernel (see drivers/hid/bpf/progs). I try to sync them
with the userspace tree when time permits
So basically, distributions can say "we ship only BPF objects compiled
from the kernel tree". It doesn't mean they have to be in a released
kernel already to remove the friction, but in the process of being
released could be sufficient.
Cheers,
Benjamin
