DisplayPort MST Support Published For Radeon DRM Driver

Written by Michael Larabel in Radeon on 23 February 2015 at 10:26 PM EST. Add A Comment
RADEON
After figuring out DisplayPort MST support for the open-source Intel graphics driver, David Airlie of Red Hat has moved on to publishing patches to the Radeon DRM driver for enabling DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport.

DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) is important for newer 4K/5K monitors that expose themselves as two DisplayPort connections as well as some newer hardware like ThinkPad docking stations that rely upon this technology for multi-monitor support. David Airlie at Red Hat Australia has been working for some months on bettering the DP MST situation for the open-source Linux graphics drivers.

On Monday David posted some RFC patches for DP MST in Radeon DRM. He's soliciting developer feedback on these patches to the Radeon kernel driver for enabling the functionality, which at the earliest could appear for the Linux 4.1 kernel now that the merge window for Linux 4.0 just lapsed.

While the support is there, Airlie noted in the patch series, "It detects my 5k monitor and sees both halves, however for some reason one half is colored slighty different than the other, not sure what isn't getting loaded properly, also with an MST hub and DVI adapter I get some wierd mode timings that confuse one of my monitors at some resolutions, again not many ideas on why that is."

Those with DisplayPort MST hardware and wanting to use the open-source Radeon Linux driver can try out this patch series until the work has been mainlined in the Linux kernel in the months ahead.
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