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.

This was a hearty DRM update for Linux 4.21 with a lot of great material included. As a reminder, new on the DRM table for Linux 4.21 are:

- The AMDGPU FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync bits now that the developers worked out the core DRM properties around variable rate refresh. The Mesa/user-space side FreeSync support should be merged shortly.

- Also on the AMDGPU side is Adaptive Backlight Management (ABM) for Display Core, GPU reset support for Sea Islands / Volcanic Islands / SOC15 hardware, AMDKFD compute support for Vega 12 and Polaris 12, DCC scanout for Vega/GFX9, more xGMI work for Vega 20, GPU reset improvements, DC trace support, PowerPlay updates, and DMA-BUF support for AMDKFD.

- The Intel DRM driver has continued Gen11 Icelake fixes and new support such as around the DSI video mode enablement. There are also various other fixes and improvements.

- The Nouveau open-source NVIDIA driver has initial Turing display support. On the Tegra side is also HDMI audio for their newer SoCs.

- MSM DRM has initial Adreno A2xx series support.

- EDID support for VirtIO-GPU.

- The VMware VMWGFX driver has page-flipping support with damage tracking.

- TTM memory management now supports simultaneous submissions to multiple engines.

- Texture Formatting Unit support for Broadcom V3D.

- Render node support for vGEM.

And a variety of other smaller changes as outlined in this merge. Linux 4.21 DRM benchmarks coming in soon.