FreeSync Support Lands In Linux 4.21 With Other DRM Updates In Christmas Day Merge

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeSync Support Lands In Linux 4.21 With Other DRM Updates In Christmas Day Merge

Linus Torvalds began honoring pull requests on Christmas for the in-development Linux 4.21 kernel. Among the initial pull requests were the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates that for this cycle most notably has the long-awaited FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=DRM-Changes-4.21-Merged

[brrrrttttt]

Cannot wait for Freesync to roll out on both sides!

[uid313]

FreeSync was developed by AMD and first announced in 2014.
Here we are 5 years later.
What a failure when it took Linux a half decade to get this technology.

[gbil]

FreeSync was developed by AMD and first announced in 2014.
Here we are 5 years later.
What a failure when it took Linux a half decade to get this technology.

I'm pretty sure freesync was/is in the PRO driver since year

[andrebrait]

FreeSync was developed by AMD and first announced in 2014.
Here we are 5 years later.
What a failure when it took Linux a half decade to get this technology.

How many years it's been since they started investing more on the open graphics stack, though? I don't think FreeSync was much of a priority since they had to get the important parts to work first, right?

I mean, do you remember the state of things back in 2014?

[LeJimster]

It'll be nice to finally use my freesync monitor how it was intended. I'm wondering if it will be enabled on all titles or if it will need a whitelist.

I guess we will find out more over the next 3 months.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

What left for Wayland-side in KWin/Mutter, to get it work?

[Calinou]

It'll be nice to finally use my freesync monitor how it was intended. I'm wondering if it will be enabled on all titles or if it will need a whitelist.

I guess we will find out more over the next 3 months.

I wonder if it will be usable in games running in a borderless window too. I'm running some older games in a borderless window using KWin because their built-in fullscreen mode relies on exclusive fullscreen, which works really poorly on Linux.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

One of the canonical developers recently said Freesync support on mutter would be trivial.

For XWayland apps running under Mutter too?

[schmidtbag]

FreeSync was developed by AMD and first announced in 2014.
Here we are 5 years later.
What a failure when it took Linux a half decade to get this technology.

Linux desktop users are a somewhat niche market. I don't know what the Linux statistics are of AMD users, but if it's anything like Windows, that's roughly 1/4 of the desktop userbase. Of that population, those who have a Freesync-capable display (and GPU) are only a select few. I'm sure most of those who have a Freesync-capable display care more about their hardware functioning than if their drivers are open-source, so, they likely opted for the pro drivers.
All that being said, AMD desktop Linux users who demand an open-source Freesync experience could probably be summed up to just a few hundred people, and even that sounds like a high estimate. Considering they aren't even OGL 4.6 compliant yet and just recently got OCL 2.0, I for one am not opposed to how they prioritized this feature.

EDIT:
BTW, the first Freesync-capable displays were released in 2015.