Linux 5.13 Graphics Drivers Are Exciting From Intel Alder Lake S Bring-Up To AMD FreeSync HDMI

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver changes have been submitted and merged for the ongoing Linux 5.13 kernel merge window and it brings with it many changes, especially for these open-source Intel and AMD Radeon drivers.

Highlights of the kernel graphics/display driver work for Linux 5.13 includes:

- The Intel driver has added support for Alder Lake S hardware. There is also other next-gen hardware work around DDR5/LPDDR5 and other work.

- Lots of Intel graphics driver churn continues around bringing up DG1 / discrete graphics support into this driver.

- The AMDGPU driver finally has support for HDMI FreeSync support! FreeSync via DisplayPort has been supported by this open-source AMD Radeon driver for years while finally the HDMI code is wired up for the pre-HDMI-2.1 FreeSync spec. HDMI 2.1 Variable Rate Refresh is still blocked in open-source drivers by the HDMI Forum.

- Initial support for the AMD Aldebaran accelerator / CDNA compute card.

- Various AMDGPU power management and display improvements.

- The Freedreno DRM driver has initial support for the Qualcomm SC7280.

- Raspberry Pi 4 CEC support within the VC4 DRM driver for HDMI Consumer Electronic Controls.

- DRM core code has seen work around DisplayID handling.

- The GUD Generic USB display driver was added to make for some innovative use-cases moving forward.

Overall it's quite a lively cycle on the open-source graphics/display driver front between new features and hardware support for yet-to-be-released graphics processors. The full list of DRM feature patches for the Linux 5.13 merge window can be found via this pull request that was already merged to mainline.