AMD's DAL Was Just Presented At XDC2016, Still Not Clear When It Will Be Mainlined

Written by Michael Larabel in AMD on 23 September 2016 at 07:16 AM EDT. 18 Comments
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Harry Wentland of AMD just presented at the XDC2016 conference about DAL, the big Display Abstraction Layer code-base, which many AMD Linux users have been waiting to see merged in order to have Polaris audio support and this is one of the stepping stones for seeing FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync and other modern display capabilities.

We have been covering DAL for months since AMD open-sourced it and since then they've been trying to clean it up, remove some redundancies compared to what core DRM offers, etc. DAL is a big piece of the puzzle that's left for getting mainlined so the AMDGPU open-source kernel driver can be closer to feature parity with the closed-source driver and what's provided on Windows.

This "DAL 3" code is focused on supporting HDMI 2.0, DisplayPort 1.4, 4K@120Hz, 5K display support, 8K display support plus for supporting DRM atomic mode-setting, dynamic refresh rates, compression, wide gamut displauy, HDR, and more.

DAL is currently made use of in the AMDGPU-PRO driver, but there is no indication of when it may be ready for merging into the mainline AMDGPU DRM driver or even if it's a high a priority now for AMD developers to get it merged.

Hearing about mainlining plans was a big hope going into this presentation, but unfortunately nothing to share at this time. If you are interested in learning more about DAL, you can see the PDF slides or watch the stream embedded below. As mentioned yesterday, it's certainly not coming for Linux 4.9 so now Linux 4.10 would be the next possible target.

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