Intel Sends In Final Batch Of DRM Features For Linux 4.11: DP MST Audio, HuC Firmware

Daniel Vetter, the i915 DRM kernel maintainer from Intel's Open-Source Technology Center, has announced their final set of feature changes to be queued in DRM-Next for the Linux 4.11 kernel.

Going back to the end of 2016 they had already been staging their DRM / graphics changes for Linux 4.11. They've sent in several series of updates and the code sent out today is believed to be their last feature work they are looking to merge for this next kernel cycle.

The updates today aren't too exciting for end-users. Among the changes are some code clean-ups, Panel Self Refresh (PSR) fixes, and various other fixes throughout. Two noticable items though include DP MST audio (DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport) support as well as HuC loading support. DP MST was already supported by the Intel DRM driver while with Linux 4.11 is now DP MST audio capability.

The HuC is another binary-only firmware blob. HuC follows in the GuC firmware blobs for the Intel DRM driver. HuC is related to video decoding support.

Earlier feature work already in DRM-Next for the Intel driver on Linux 4.11 is frame-buffer compression by default for Skylake and newer hardware. Great to see FBC finally getting flipped on by default there! Linux 4.11 also has initial support for Intel Geminilake.

The changes for this latest DRM-Next i915 pull request can be found via intel-gfx.