Intel Has Last Round Of DRM Changes For Linux 3.19, Starts Dropping DRI1/UMS

The Linux 3.19 kernel that's a few weeks out still from officially being under development is quite heavy on the changes.

In earlier pull requests for DRM-Next, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center graphics driver team already sent in initial hardware enablement for Skylake (the 2015 Broadwell successor), other new features, and many other enhancements. Today the final intel-drm-next pull request was sent in to DRM subsystem maintainer David Airlie.

This final batch of drm-intel-next changes that target the Linux 3.19 kernel merge window include infoframe tracking for fastboot, the start of removing DRI1 and user-space mode-setting (UMS) support, RPS code improvements (especially for Broadwell), backlight improvements for Bay Trail and Cherry Trail hardware, Skylake Embedded DisplayPort programming, and numerous other fixes all over the place for the Intel i915 DRM driver. With kernel mode-setting having been stable for a few years now and DRI2/DRI3 support being widely adopted, UMS/DRI1 support has been on its death bed with receiving little attention or end-user usage.

Linux 3.19 will contain a ton of Intel DRM graphics driver improvements, particularly for Broadwell, Bay Trail, and Cherry Trail. The full list of changes in this final batch can be found via this mailing list post.