More HDR Display Bits On The Way For The Linux 5.3 Kernel

For years there have been open-source developers working on plumbing support for High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays into the Linux desktop stack and it looks like the Direct Rendering Manager driver support is slowly but surely getting there.

With the Linux 5.3 kernel cycle later this summer, there will be more HDR infrastructure support in place. As part of this week's drm-misc-next pull request to DRM-Next for staging this Linux 5.3 material there are more HDR pieces.

This latest DRM core work is on handling of the HDR source meta-data property, parsing of HDR meta-data information from the EDID data, Hybrid Log-Gamma (HLG) support for the supported transfer functions, and enabling HDR info-frame support.

The latest HDR DRM activity can be seen here. NVIDIA has also been working for a while now on their binary Linux driver support around HDR displays. But there is also common work left still in user-space around applications and compositors for enabling this technology.

This latest HDR DRM push comes thanks to Intel's contributions to the DRM kernel drivers as well as Wayland/Weston. Intel is working on this open-source/Linux code now thanks to Icelake/Gen11 graphics supporting HDR.