Intel "Big Joiner" Enabling Nearly Squared Away For Allowing 8K Output On A Single Port

For the past several months there have been a number of Intel Linux DRM patch series around "big joiner" support and that is looking like it may soon be finished up for allowing support for driving 8K displays off a single port.

Intel's "big joiner" support with Ice Lake / Gen11 and newer is for allowing two pipes to drive a single transcoder. The main focus of big joiner is for being able to drive an 8K display (at 30Hz or 60Hz, depending upon conditions) off a single DP port.

There has been a lot of prep work involved and sending out the actual big joiner patch series through multiple revisions and rounds of code review in recent months. Due to opening up the concept of allowing multiple pipes to drive a single transcoder has resulted in a lot of refactoring and other low-level changes to their display engine code.

But it looks like that work may be settling down and this morning the 15th version of the Intel i915 DRM patches were sent out for big joiner enabling and appears to be working for 8K@30/60 over DisplayPort. It's possible we could see this big joiner enabling land for Linux 5.11 if all goes well.