Intel Does Another Batch Of Linux 3.13 Graphics Changes

While the Linux 3.12 kernel hasn't even been released yet, going back to late August Intel has been plotting their graphics improvements for Linux 3.13. In September Intel was already sending in drm-next changes and they have done more rounds since. Another drm-next pull request was issued today for the Intel DRM driver.

The drm-intel-next 2013-10-18 changes range from CRC support to better Valley View / Bay Trail support and support for making FBDEV optional.

- CRC support, which can allow for the developers to test a lot of mode-setting corner-cases automatically.

- An HDMI audio fix.

- Valley View (Bay Trail graphics) DPLL computation code refactoring.

- Fix-ups for the GPU Booster from other recent code changes.

- Context code clean-ups.

- More watermark work.

- Vblank timestamp improvements.

- Support so the Intel DRM driver doesn't need to rely on FBDEV. This includes DRM core code changes too but makes it so the Intel driver doesn't need fbdev helpers and the kernel can be configured to CONFIG_FB=n.

- DisplayPort link training improvements.

- MMIO VTable (Virtual Table) support for future hardware (prep work for Broadwell?).

This latest DRM Intel driver pull request can be found on the DRI-devel mailing list.

Now if only all open-source GPU drivers had this many developers working on open-source driver improvements... (Intel has more than two dozen Linux GPU driver developers.)