Keith Packard Making Progress On DRM Leases For VR HMDs

Written by Michael Larabel in X.Org on 1 April 2017 at 08:01 AM EDT. 3 Comments
X.ORG
Keith Packard recently released a blog post covering changes he's making to DRM/X for VR head mounted displays to better support them as part of his working with Valve and wanting to ensure these virtual reality headsets don't get in the way of window managers and allow VR apps/games to directly interface with them. He's published another update to his work.

Keith has now written another blog post concerning this "DRM leases" concept for allowing the VR apps/games to interface with VR HMDs using the Linux DRM APIs. The post in full can be read here.

There still is additional kernel work needed for his plan and given the timing of it, the earliest we could see this mainlined would be Linux 4.13. He's also planning to extend RandR as well as do some EDID-based matching code for HMDs within the xorg-server. There's yet to be a release schedule for X.Org Server 1.20, so hopefully it will make that, but long story short, this work is still several months out before it's within easy each of Linux gamers.
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