Linux 6.3 To Enable Display Support For Intel Meteor Lake, DP MST DSC Enabled

Since Linux 6.0 there has been various graphics driver code being upstreamed for Intel's next-generation Meteor Lake processors, among other Meteor Lake driver enablement work in general. Now coming with the Linux 6.3 cycle is enough of the graphics/display driver support for Meteor Lake being in place that it can actually light up a display.

With this week's drm-intel-next changes submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.3 merge window opening in mid-February is this display enablement for Meteor Lake. Enough of the i915 Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver work for Meteor Lake is now wired up that displays should be working when connected to early MTL hardware and running the Linux 6.3+ kernel code.

Meteor Lake display support is the main addition with this week's drm-intel-next update while another big one is having DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport Display Stream Compression (DP MST DSC) now working too. This Display Stream Compression support for DP Multi-Stream Transport is good for conserving bandwidth (and in turn allowing higher resolutions / refresh rates) and similar to the Intel driver's existing Single Stream Transport (SST) support. The VESA-developed compression support offers lossless compression for allowing higher resolutions or refresh rates over the same hardware over Multi-Stream Transport displays or hubs with MST supporting multiple video display signals over a single DisplayPort cable.

Some of the other Intel driver updates for the week include SDP split support for DisplayPort 2.0, Xe HP 4Tile support, and a wide variety of fixes and other code refactoring.

The full list of initial drm-intel-next feature patches targeting Linux 6.3 can be found via this pull. Intel's Linux engineers also remain busy hacking away on the new "Xe" kernel graphics driver for modern hardware platforms but that looks like it will still be a while before it's ready for merging as the modern alternative to the i915 DRM driver.