Google Continues Working On More Linux HDCP Bits

Google engineers continue working on enhancing the Linux infrastructure around supporting High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) for Chrome OS.

Over the years there has been much work on HDCP Linux support by Google for Chrome OS as well as by the GPU driver vendors and others for select use-cases around protecting media playback / digital content protections.

The newest on the HDCP front from Google is proposing a new "Content Protection Property" for DRM connection properties. The proposed Content Protection Property would be a way for user-space to push an HDCP key from user-space to the underlying driver requiring a key to enable HDCP for a given display / monitor connector.

Up to this point the drivers requiring a key for enabling HDCP have relied on a less than ideal means of passing it via DebugFS while this newly proposed way is as a standardized DRM connection property. Those interested in more details can see the Content Protection Property patch series. For those that have been frightened or disgruntled by prior Linux HDCP driver patches, this work alone is not introducing any new restrictions on users and will go unused barring getting your handles on any capable Linux user-space stack with necessary key support, etc.