Intel Has More DRM Graphics Fixes Needed For Kabylake In Linux 4.7

Written by Michael Larabel in Linux Kernel on 18 July 2016 at 10:19 PM EDT. 1 Comment
LINUX KERNEL
The Linux 4.7 kernel is expected to be officially released this coming weekend, but a pile of Intel Kabylake fixes are needed if the DRM graphics support is to be in order.

Intel's Daniel Vetter sent in a request to DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie to consider pulling these Kabylake (KBL) fixes for Linux 4.7. He explained, "here's the pile of kbl cherry-picks assembled by Mika&Rodrigo. It's a bit much, but all well-contained to kbl code and been tested for a while in drm-intel-next. Still separate in case too much, but in that case I think we'd need to disable kbl by default again (which would be annoying too) in 4.7."

These Kabylake fixes touch a few hundred lines of code but will hopefully not cause problems for other generations of Intel graphics users. It will be interesting to see if David and then in turn Linus Torvalds accept these changes this late for Linux 4.7 and/or if the Kabylake support gets disabled by default.

After a rough Skylake launch last year, it's sad to see Kabylake still coming through with last-minute work to get the graphics hardware in suitable shape. But at least with Kabylake it sounds like Intel isn't going to be releasing the hardware until the end of the year or perhaps early 2017, so there's still time for these graphics driver changes to be mainlined and in turn appear within released Linux distributions before year's end. But for that to happen, hopefully Kabylake will be in good shape for Linux 4.8 since that's the kernel to get picked up by Ubuntu 16.10 and friends.
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