The Big DRM Graphics Driver Changes Land In Linux 3.18

The much anticipated DRM feature pull was merged over the night for the Linux 3.18 kernel that's now in its early stages of development.

Highlights of the graphics / Direct Rendering Manager driver changes for the Linux 3.18 merge window include:

AMD Radeon

- RV6xx UVD support! The original Unified Video Decoder found on the Radeon HD 3000 series support is finally supported by the open-source AMD Linux driver... While later revisions of the UVD video decode engine have already been long supported by the open-source driver.

- Userptr support after it missed out on Linux 3.17.

- Improved DPM / re-clocking support for certain graphics cards that should offer better performance.

- Improved buffer placement for potential performance benefits.

- HDMI audio fixes.

Intel HD Graphics

- Cherryview support improvements for the forthcoming Intel Atom SoCs.

- Early prep work for Intel Skylake while the actual Skylake "Gen9" graphics enablement is expected for the Linux 3.19 kernel. Skylake succeeds Broadwell in H2'2015. While not yet merged, the Intel Skylake Linux graphics code is out there.

- 180 degree rotation support.

- Execlist command submission

- Various bug-fixes and smaller changes.

Nouveau

- DisplayPort audio support.

- Various re-clocking improvements including some work on Kepler memory re-clocking but still nothing too exciting for end-users to cheer about.

- Fan control improvements.

- Other changes.

Other

- DRM core has work on Atomc mode-setting prep changes.

- Various fencing work took place for many of the DRM drivers.

- Exynos DRM updates.

- Other bug-fixes and code clean-ups.

The full DRM pull request for Linux 3.18-rc1 can be found via the kernel mailing list.