Intel Posts Linux Patches Bringing Up DisplayPort 2.0 - DG2 Alchemist To Support DP 2.0

It looks like 2022 is when we will start seeing DisplayPort 2.0 hardware broadly available... It was just earlier this week I wrote about AMD working on DisplayPort 2.0 for their open-source Radeon Linux driver and now coincidentally today Intel has begun their open-source Linux graphics driver enablement for DP 2.0.

Intel just published an initial set of 17 patches working to prepare DisplayPort 2.0 functionality for their "i915" kernel graphics driver. This includes various low-level driver changes for being able to handle DisplayPort 2.0 but isn't yet a complete DP 2.0 implementation.

Worth noting with these initial Intel DisplayPort 2.0 patches though is are DG2-specific changes... Thereby confirming Intel's next-gen DG2 graphics cards will support DisplayPort 2.0. As announced earlier this week, "Alchemist" is the new codename for DG2 and Intel's first "Arc" graphics cards will be coming in Q1'2022. One of the patches does explicitly spell out as well, "DG2 supports DP 2.0 UHBR [Ultra High Bit Rate] and 128b/132b channel encoding."

DisplayPort 2.0 was announced back in June of 2019 and can offer a 3x increase in data bandwidth performance. It's taken a while for DP 2.0 graphics cards and monitors in part delayed by the pandemic, but it looks like over the next few months that will change.

This start of the DisplayPort 2.0 enabling for the Intel Linux kernel graphics driver can be found on the mailing list. With the timing of these initial patches, that support isn't expected to be mainlined until at least the Linux 5.16 kernel later this year.