Linux 4.17 To Likely Include Intel DRM Driver's HDCP Support

Back in November a Google developer proposed HDCP content protection support for the Intel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) Linux driver that is based upon their code from Chrome OS / Chromium OS. It looks like that High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection support in the i915 DRM driver will come for Linux 4.17.

It's too late to happen for Linux 4.16 considering it would be too tardy for it to be comfortably added to DRM-Next. Google developer Sean Paul who has been spearheading this HDMI/DisplayPort HDCP support for the open-source Intel DRM driver believes the code is now ready for merging.

With his sixth revision to the patches he noted today, "This is The One...I'll push this to a topic branch in the drm-misc tree and send a pull request to Dave for 4.17 after the 4.16 merge window is over."

This near-final version of the HDCP support for the i915 DRM code comes in at just under two thousand lines of code and supports HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. The content protection is exposed through a new DRP property with OFF/DESIRED/ENABLED states for links and as mentioned is modeled after the code Google has been using in Chrome OS.

But before anyone gets too bent out of shape over this code, this doesn't restrict any of the users rights on its own or force any content protection by default. This is just one piece of the puzzle for any HDCP support and is not enabled by default or anything along those lines.