QEMU's EDID Support Coming Together, Allowing For Eventual HiDPI Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Virtualization on 9 March 2019 at 12:23 PM EST. 12 Comments
VIRTUALIZATION
Support is coming together within the Linux kernel and QEMU for this important piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack to handle Extended Display Identification Data (EDID) for the virtual displays to handle some practical improvements moving forward.

EDID support within QEMU will be useful for being able to sanely express preferred video modes / resolutions, monitor details, and related bits supported by EDID in an effective manner and allowing for plumbing in other features like HiDPI support.

QEMU 3.1 has initial EDID generator code albeit disabled by default while for the upcoming QEMU 4.0 there is EDID support planned for VirtIO-GPU and other improvements. In QEMU 4.0 it looks like the EDID support will still be disabled by default but can be enabled via the edid=on option but if all goes well could become the default in QEMU 4.1.

The Linux 5.0 kernel release brought EDID support to the VirtIO-GPU protocol, the VFIO MDEV interface for vGPUs added EDID support, and the DRM Bochs and VirtIO-GPU drivers also added their kernel side bits. Moving forward, Intel is working towards supporting EDID within their GVT code.

Long story short, while in flux still, the EDID support for QEMU is coming together as the building blocks for future display improvements for those using desktop virtualization. Details on the effort can be found via this blog post by developer Gerd Hoffmann.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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