Qualcomm Snapdragon MDP5 display controller
The display and compositing block found in mid-2010s Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile and embedded SoCs, including the MSM8x16/8x26/8x74/8x94/8x96 generations, APQ8084, and the MSM8917/8937/8953 family. It drives the on-chip pipelines that push pixels to phone, tablet, and embedded panels on those platforms.
recommendation
Worth keeping but worth flagging as legacy: the hardware it covers is mid-2010s Snapdragon silicon that has not been sold new for years, and Qualcomm's newer SoCs use the separate DPU1 driver instead. However, the code is still actively maintained (around 98 commits and 31 authors in the last five years), some chips like MSM8917/8937/8953/8996 still rely on MDP5 rather than the migrated DPU path, and there is no upstream removal effort in flight, so deployed devices would lose display support if it were dropped.
repository signals
sources
- git.kernel.org
MDP5 supports older Qualcomm display blocks including msm8x26, msm8x74, apq8084, msm8x16, msm8x36, msm8x94, msm8x96, msm8x76, msm8x53, msm8917, and msm8937.
- git.kernel.org
Upstream still carries an MDP5-vs-DPU migration path: sdm630/sdm660 are marked migrated to DPU, while msm8917/msm8937/msm8953/msm8996 remain in a shared migration list and MDP5 can still be preferred.
- cateee.net
LKDDb identifies DRM_MSM_MDP5 as the Qualcomm MDP5/KMS display support block within the MSM DRM driver.
- en.wikipedia.org
The relevant Snapdragon/APQ families tied to these MDP5 blocks are mid-2010s mobile SoCs rather than current-generation 2025 platforms.
codex reasoning notes (technical)
Real driver directory, not a helper. Local shell inspection (rg/sed) showed mdp5_cfg.c enumerates only older Qualcomm SoCs and msm_drv.c documents active coexistence/migration with dpu1 rather than removal. lore_file_timeline tool on the directory path returned 0 matches, so I found no evidence of an active upstream removal series from the requested fast-path lore check. Static metadata supplied in the prompt shows strong recent maintenance (98 substantive commits in 5y, last substantive touch 2026-01-13, 31 authors), so removal/deprecation would be premature. Hardware-obsolescence judgment is an inference from the supported SoC list plus canonical-reference pages: these are legacy phone/embedded Snapdragon generations, so new-in-2025 sales look unlikely, but deployed devices likely still exist at low volume. Source URLs were obtained by canonical recall for kernel.org/LKDDb/Wikipedia pages; code facts themselves were verified with local shell reads.