HDR Support Is Being Worked On For Linux's DRM Code

With more HDR monitors hitting the market, Intel developers are working on plumbing support for High Dynamic Range displays into the Linux kernel's DRM layer.

HDR monitors allow better contrast, greater brightness, and a wider color palette compared to conventional displays. Most of you probably don't yet have HDR gaming monitors, but the number of displays continue rising this year and this week at Computex are yet more HDR monitor announcements.

Last year NVIDIA presented on their work for HDR display support on Linux -- as well as mentioning the current limitations -- while the work being done now by Intel is about prepping the DRM layer code for these next-gen displays.

A set of nine patches published today by Intel's Uma Shankar allows for HDR support in DRM with handling of HDR meta-data structures and being able to pass content from the user-space compositors to graphics drivers.

The patches are available for review but will not be merged until there is user-space support in place. Hopefully user-space will be quick in getting around HDR so that the Linux display support won't lag too long behind Windows.