Linux 3.14 Officializes Broadwell, Deprecates Legacy UMS

As usual, Intel's preparing to land a lot of exciting changes within the Linux 3.14 kernel as soon as its merge window opens in the coming days.

Daniel Vetter of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center blogged on Wednesday about the major changes queued up for the Linux 3.14 kernel as it concerns their DRM kernel graphics driver. The main changes for Intel DRM in Linux 3.14 include runtime D3 support, wwatermark computation / frame-buffer compression fixes, a rewrite of the low-level backlight code, work on full PPGTT support, Bay Trail Atom improvements, and a kernel option to disable legacy fbdev support.

Perhaps the biggest change is that with the Linux 3.14 kernel Intel's Broadwell support is considered properly supported. The Broadwell graphics code landed in Linux 3.13 but it was considered experimental and disabled by default. With Linux 3.14 the Broadwell support is there by default but it's still missing a few features for full-blown Broadwell kernel support.

The Linux 3.14 kernel is also deprecating legacy UMS support from the Intel DRM driver. Intel stripped out their user-space mode-setting from the xf86-video-intel DDX driver years ago and now they're ripping out the kernel code for supporting the old X.Org driver from the pre-KMS days.

More details on these Intel changes for the Linux 3.14 kernel can be learned from Daniel's development blog.