Linux 7.2

106

mmariuz about 4 hours ago 41 commentsRead Article on igalia.com

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Discussion Sentiment

71% Positive

Analyzed from 855 words in the discussion.

Discussion (41 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

mort96•about 2 hours ago

Does anyone understand how HDMI 2.1 support is now no problem? I remember that 2.1 support in AMD's open source driver was blocked by the HDMI forum, but I haven't heard any news about them unblocking it. What changed?

lashkari•about 2 hours ago

It doesn't give any specifics about what changed on the HDMI Forum side, but this article [0] from June indicates that Valve worked closely with AMD to get it pushed through prior to the release of the Steam Machine (which supports HDMI 2.1 VRR).

[0] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/news/2026/06/valves-hdmi-2-1-...

seanw444•about 2 hours ago

As far as I can recall: some internal implementation documentation leaked which made the legal position tougher for them somehow to protect it as proprietary (it made sense when I heard it explained, but now I feel like I'm missing an important detail to that), and then Valve had some talks with the HDMI Forum to convince them to let it go, presumably so they could have such support integrated into Linux for their hardware (Deck, Machine, Frame, etc).

So now the HDMI Forum just doesn't really care anymore I guess.

gary_0•about 1 hour ago

IIRC, a non-AMD contributor was working on adding HDMI 2.1 support to Linux's AMD driver, and then AMD managed to get the HDMI Forum to see that their position was moot and was making things very awkward for AMD.

mort96•about 1 hour ago

Oh this makes sense! Obviously, it can't be illegal for a non-forum-member to add HDMI support; it's just an HDMI forum policy after all, not law. That's certainly the link I was missing for this to make sense.

dayofthedaleks•about 1 hour ago

White collar crime is legal now so IP violation is a pretend concept.

Update - Happily eating the downvotes on this one.

calgoo•about 1 hour ago

Only if an AI does it, so make sure the vibe code the driver

yipinwong•about 2 hours ago

Who is the main audience for this type of content? Genuinely curious because I am not a serious Linux user.

What type of info do you get out of this for those who read this? So i can glance your insight?

sph•about 2 hours ago

It's a well-formatted changelog of the most salient features of the release. Linus doesn't provide one apart from a list of added commits and merged branches, which isn't very useful unless you are a kernel developer.

NewJazz•about 2 hours ago

This isn't quite right.

This is a well-formatted changelog of the changes that Igalia has contributed to the release, AFAICT.

KernelNewbies publishes a much more general summary of changes (it is much longer than this one).

https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges

https://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxVersions

realityking•about 1 hour ago

It only covers changes made by Igalia devs. For a more general changelog I’d recommend the LWN articles:

https://lwn.net/Articles/1078068/ https://lwn.net/Articles/1078539/

yipinwong•42 minutes ago

ty for the context. I was not aware of the Linux dev ecosystem.

tuna74•about 2 hours ago

I think it is mostly "marketing" for Igalia's services. If you want to pay people to do "stuff" in Linux and adjacent projects like Mesa, Igalia seems very competent.

igleria•about 2 hours ago

hi audience, we know about this stuff you use on a daily basis, you may be interested in our executive summary of the latest release of the stuff

gchamonlive•about 2 hours ago

I don't think there is much too it, it's a consulting firm. Would you hire a consulting firm with an empty tech blog portifolio? It's ticking a box, it's stating it's a consulting firm in tech, that it's target audience are companies with Linux machines etc...

yipinwong•40 minutes ago

ty. so very narrow audicence it seems.

Per @sph, as Linus provide no changelog, seems like the firm is putting it together for others

Retr0id•about 2 hours ago

I for one am excited about HDMI 2.1 support on AMD.

seanw444•about 1 hour ago

It's more than that: free and open support for HDMI 2.1 in general. Previously it was only proprietary implementations that didn't leak the spec which were allowed. AMD is just the only one that has really good open source drivers which can benefit from it, and didn't work around the problem by converting HDMI to DisplayPort in a proprietary on-board GPU chip.

yipinwong•39 minutes ago

OK, now this is what I wanted to know as well. I was not aware that changelogs show all this inf.

ty for sharing

OtomotO•about 1 hour ago

Okay, so ELI 5 why I would now use HDMI instead of DP?

All my monitors support DP, my GPU has more ports for DP ...

I am genuinely interested as I've never even considered using HDMI for my Desktop.

drdexebtjl•about 1 hour ago

If you’re using a TV. They rarely have DP ports.

ThatPlayer•about 1 hour ago

HDMI 2.1 carries more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4. Plenty of GPU/monitors have that port arrangement, as recent as Nvidia's RTX 40 Series.

preisschild•about 1 hour ago

Yeah but this is for amdgpu and they had DP2.1 support for a while now.

ThatPlayer•35 minutes ago

That doesn't help when the monitors don't have DP2.1 support.

ulfbert_inc•30 minutes ago

HDMI is a king on consumer TVs. Linux (in form of SteamOS) is becoming a major console gaming platform thanks to Valve.

whalesalad•44 minutes ago

I have been using HDMI to game on TV for most or all of my adult life. Mostly console gaming. A few years back I built a dedicated gaming rig, but I still use it with a controller from my couch connected to a TV.

So this is a win for couch gamers and open source in general.

hndbwksam7•about 2 hours ago

Great context, thanks for adding it

pelcg•6 minutes ago

Sounds like an AI comment.

bigwheels•27 minutes ago

Why is DRM being implemented in the Kernel; What is the profile for an end-user who wants this in their FOSS?

telotortium•21 minutes ago

Here it doesn’t mean “digital rights management”, but “Direct Rendering Manager”, a component of the kernel’s graphics stack: https://docs.kernel.org/gpu/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

voxic11•20 minutes ago

People who want to play video games, or watch videos using hardware decoding, or train machine learning models? DRM here means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager

> DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations such as configuring the mode setting of the display.

> User-space programs can use the DRM API to command the GPU to do hardware-accelerated 3D rendering and video decoding, as well as GPGPU computing.

Shish2k•20 minutes ago

The Direct Rendering Manager is useful for any Linux user who wants to display things on a monitor (unless you're happy with like 640x480 VESA, in which case maybe you don't need it)

Lorkki•21 minutes ago

This is DRM as in Direct Rendering Manager, which is the kernel interface to GPU hardware; not Digital Rights Management.

cogman10•20 minutes ago

Named long before Digital Rights Management was a thing (or at least the 3 letter acronym existed for it).

lultimouomo•22 minutes ago

Different DRM, the one in the kernel is Direct Rendering Manager, which is basically managing access to the GPU.

sapphyrus•15 minutes ago

DRM refers to Direct Rendering Manager in this context.

dralley•21 minutes ago

DRM = Direct Rendering Manager. GPU scheduling.

proxycon•18 minutes ago

its the Direct Rendering Manager, not the other DRM