AMD Sends Out Revised DAL Patches, Various Cleanups

The latest DAL (Display Abstraction Layer) patches are now available for testing that represent the past four weeks of work by AMD developers on working towards getting the code reworked into a state that it can be merged in the mainline Linux kernel.

The big DAL code-base is what's needed for supporting functionality like DisplayPort and HDMI audio, HDMI 2.0 on supported hardware, DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST), better power management, and other capabilities. It's also necessary for ultimately supporting FreeSync / Adaptive-Sync on Linux. DAL code has been public for months now but hasn't yet been ready for merging into the mainline Linux kernel and unfortunately won't be ready for the Linux 4.10 merge window opening next month.

Developers have said though they want this DAL code merged in time for AMD's Raven Ridge APU launch so they no longer need to support DAL and non-DAL code-paths for the AMDGPU kernel driver with new hardware enablement. Raven Ridge is the x86 Zen-based APU with Vega graphics and stacked HBM memory, but the Raven Ridge APUs aren't expected to be out until later in 2017, still giving AMD time to mainline the DAL support.

With the newest DAL code sent out today, there has been a number of clean-ups to improve the code quality and various bug fixes. This set of DAL patches weigh in at 76 patches and down to just 180 files changed, 4101 insertions, 8868 deletions.

More details on these latest DAL patches via the amd-gfx list.