Nouveau Sees Fix To Properly Handle Mini DP Connectors - Avoids GNOME Mutter Crashing

The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver in Linux 5.11 didn't see any exciting features but there is now a patch pending for this DRM driver so it will at least handle mini DisplayPort connections properly.

While Mini DisplayPort is just a miniaturized version of DisplayPort, a missing explicit check for the mDP connector was leading to problems.

This tiny patch is needed for Nouveau to properly handle Mini DisplayPort outputs, which up to now was otherwise being recognized as Embedded DisplayPort. This prior behavior caused troubles as it would end up causing the GNOME Mutter compositor to crash.

This lack of proper Mini Display Port handling in Nouveau was pointed out by Lenovo's Mark Pearson who has been involved with their effort on ensuring Linux runs nicely on their expanding device portfolio where Linux preloads are an option.

The patch isn't yet mainlined but it is marked for back-porting to the stable series once it's landed. The basic mDP connector support has been about the most Nouveau excitement in Q4, sadly... Hopefully in 2021 NVIDIA finally has some much anticipated open-source news to report.