The Big DRM Update Lands In Linux 4.16: DC Multi-Display Sync, More Cannonlake

Adding to the list of big feature additions for Linux 4.16 is the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) pull request that has already been honored by Linus Torvalds.

DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie refers to DRM for Linux 4.16 as a "comparatively quieter merge window", but there still is a lot of stuff in here for improving these open-source GPU/display kernel drivers. It is quieter though for open-source NVIDIA users with this pull not having any Nouveau DRM updates for Linux 4.16.

- AMDGPU has 48-bit GPUVM support for Vega and Raven Ridge, ECC support for Vega, multi-display synchronization support in AMDGPU DC, TTM operation context support, resizable BAR support, 2+1 level GPU page table handling, and various Raven Ridge APU fixes.

- The AMDGPU scheduler has been punted off to a common area so other drivers can re-use this code. In particular, Etnaviv is planning to make use of this shared GPU scheduler for Linux 4.17.

- The AMDKFD driver for HSA compute support has GFX7/8 SDMA user queues, hardware scheduling for multiple processes, and discrete GPU prep work. As reported already, with Linux 4.17 is when some discrete GPUs will begin working with the upstream AMDKFD kernel driver for easily supporting ROCm/OpenCL without needing any kernel changes.

- Hardware workarounds and other improvements for Intel Cannonlake "Gen 10" graphics with this hardware we should be seeing later this year.

- New firmware support for Skylake and Kabylake graphics.

- Better robustness around GPU resets with the Intel driver.

- DEVFREQ support for MSM.

- Tegra186 / Jetson TX2 display support.

- The FBDEV driver footprint has been reduced.

- Various other fixes and improvements to the smaller DRM drivers.

The complete list of DRM feature changes for the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window can be found via this pull request.