Most system on chip (SoC) board rely on explicitly enumerated hardware resources, rather than discovery mechanisms like ACPI that are common on workstations, servers, or laptops. To add support for an SoC's display controller, you will need to modify the board driver to expose hardware resources that your display driver can use. See display-engine.cc for an example. Most devices need some combination of the following:
- MMIO regions
- Interrupts for vsync, hotplug events (typically through GPIO), etc. For example, the AMLogic display controller has both an RDMA engine and a capture interface with their own interrupts.
- BTIs, Zircon's primitive for pinning virtual memory to physical addresses for hardware interaction.
- GPIO pins, e.g. to turn on/off hardwired LCD panels.
- Power resources, to turn on power to the controller and select operating voltages.
- I2C bridges, e.g. for controlling DSI-to-HDMI output converters.
- DSI access, because DSI support is typically a separate driver offered by the kernel.
- Sysmem heaps, so that clients can allocate memory that is accessible to the device.
After all these resources have been enumerated, call AddComposite to
expose them as a unit. The device manager will look for drivers that can
bind to this composite device and load the appropriate display driver.
This change is a complete example of board driver modifications for the VIM3.