Linux 4.7 Will Bring Intel Color Manager, Changes Needed For Vulkan On Haswell

While the Linux 4.6 kernel is still a number of weeks away from being released with the merge window only having recently closed, the Intel OTC developers responsible for the i915 DRM graphics driver have already begun aligning their first round of updates for DRM-Next to in turn target Linux 4.7.

First up, for Intel Haswell users, Linux 4.7 will have changes needed for their Mesa driver's Vulkan support. The command parser in the i915 DRM driver for Linux 4.7 whitelists a number of registers needed for Vulkan support on Haswell. That's in the command parser side while all of the Vulkan magic on Intel hardware under Linux continues to happen within their branched Mesa codebase for their "Anvil" Vulkan driver.

Also noteworthy is that the Intel DRM driver in Linux 4.7 will support pipe-level color management. The color management is handled by a set of properties attached to a CRTC. This color management support is available for Intel Broadwell, Skylake, Broxton, Kabylake, and Cherryview hardware. The color manager will work for items like de-gamma, color conversion matrix, and gamma correction.

Aside from those two features, there is also continued work on atomic support in the Intel driver, VBT code refactoring, cleaning up the PLL computation code, DSI support, and a number of other internal code clean-ups and changes.

More details on this early Intel graphics driver work for Linux 4.7 via DRM-Next can be found via this mailing list post.