DRM Graphics Drivers Already Queuing Changes For Linux 5.1

While the Linux 5.0 kernel merge window (nee Linux 4.21) just closed this past Sunday, already there are Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver updates queuing for DRM-Next to then premiere with the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle in about two months.

Maxime Ripard of Bootlin, serving as a new patch wrangler for drm-misc-next that consists of DRM core changes as well as queuing the changes to the smaller DRM drivers, sent in this first pull request to DRM-Next of Linux 5.1 material. This pull has a few core changes as well as work to Broadcom's V3D and VC4 drivers, Rockchip, Sun4i, and VirtIO.

DRM core work for this next kernel includes a common helper for DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) handling of hot-plugging for Radeon/i915/AMDGPU drivers, i2c improvements in the DP MST code, and a new helper to create and attach TV margin properties. DMA-BUF fence sequence numbers are also now 64-bit with the latest changes.

On the Broadcom driver front, the VC4 "Raspberry Pi" graphics driver has reflection support as well as HDMI over-scan capabilities. The Broadcom V3D driver for their next-gen graphics cores has improved cache flushing.

The Rockchip and Sun4i Allwinner drivers meanwhile are picking up implicit fencing support and the VirtIO DRM code has switched to generic FBDEV emulation.

More details on these early changes for the Linux 5.1 DRM-Next queue can be found via this pull request.