AMD Adds Secure Video Playback To Their Open-Source Linux Driver

In addition to Mesa 20.3 seeing RadeonSI support for EGL protected surfaces backed by the AMDGPU Linux kernel driver with Trusted Memory Zone support, AMD's graphics driver developers have now added support for secure/protected video acceleration playback to their Mesa driver code.

To the Gallium3D video acceleration state tracker is now support for "secure" video playback with AMD's Gallium3D driver (RadeonSI) for the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) interface -- the predominant video acceleration interface on Linux by the Intel and Radeon graphics stacks.

This secure video playback with the VA-API code makes use of AMDGPU TMZ (Trusted Memory Zone) and is enabled for the H.264, H.265/HEVC, and VP9 formats. The Radeon Video Core Next (VCN) block supports dealing with the encrypted content and using TMZ buffers.

This Radeon secure/protected video playback support was merged ahead of the imminent Mesa 20.3 branching, which should see its stable release in December.