HDCP 2.2 Content Protection Being Worked On For The i915 DRM Driver

With the upcoming Linux 4.17 kernel cycle there will be initial support for HDCP with the i915 DRM driver. That High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) support in its initial form is limited to v1.4 on HDMI/DP connectors, but HDCP 2.2 is now being tackled.

Building off that HDCP v1.4 support done by Google's Chrome OS developers for the i915 DRM Linux driver, Intel developers are now working on extending that to HDCP v2.2 capabilities. HDCP2 is an entirely different link protection design from HDCP1. HDCP 2.x support for newer devices supports more encryption standards, supports WirelessHD and Miracast wireless display standards, a new authentication protocol, and other changes effectively making it a clean sheet design but with some commonalities between the versions.

Ramalingam C of Google posted the latest HDCP 2.2 patches today. The HDCP2 encryption and authentication is done using Intel's Management Engine (ME) firmware As a result, this brings a new "MEI HDCP" driver for the Management Engine bus for handling the authentication. The exposed user-space interface remains the same as HDCP v1.4.

These work-in-progress patches can be found via dri-devel and amount to just under four thousand lines of code. As with the earlier HDCP patches now queued for Linux 4.17, this High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection support doesn't enforce any restrictions on users out-of-the-box but simply makes the support available if there are any Linux desktop client applications wishing to support it in the future now that the capability is available on the Linux desktop, but for those wanting to steer clear of DRM, etc, you shouldn't have anything to worry about.