The Big Graphics Driver Update Lands In Linux 5.5 With Exciting Changes For Intel + AMD

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics/display driver updates were sent out last night for the Linux 5.5 kernel and quickly landed into the mainline tree.

As usual, the DRM updates are exciting on the graphics front particularly if you are running recent generations of Intel or AMD Radeon graphics. There aren't any prominent Nouveau (open-source NVIDIA) updates but at least Intel and AMDGPU remain quite eventful along with all of the ARM/embedded drivers.

Highlights of these drivers in Linux 5.5 include:

- AMDGPU has continued onboard of the "Arcturus" Vega-derived workstation GPU with now handling VCN encoding, EEPROM support, and other features. Meanwhile Vega 20 has added RAS support.

- AMDGPU also has HDCP support plumbed in for Raven Ridge and newer. There's also Renoir APU GPU reset support, BACO support for older GCN 1.0/1.1 GPUs, MSI-X support, VCN dynamic power-gating for Raven Ridge and Raven 2, and Navi 12/14 support within the AMDKFD compute driver code.

- Various additions to the Tiger Lake / Gen12 graphics code introduced in Linux 5.4, including more power management and display improvements and other items in bringing up the next-gen graphics expected to begin appearing in Intel processors before end of year 2020.

- Intel Jasper Lake support.

- Various other Intel code updates.

- The Tegra DRM driver now supports DisplayPort for Tegra 210/186/194 SoCs.

- Various other fixes and code improvements to the smaller drivers.

The complete list of DRM changes for Linux 5.5 can be found via this pull request.