HDMI Forum Has Rejected Request from AMD for Open-Source HDMI 2.1 Driver Support

Peter_Brosdahl

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The HDMI Forum has rejected AMD's request to make driver support for HDMI 2.1 open-source thus continuing limited display options for the GPU manufacturer. AMD's engineers have been working for over three years to try and include driver support for HDMI 2.1+ in its open-source Linux kernel driver but continue to run into a roadblock with the HDMI Forum which will not grant them open-source implementation options. The topic has been ongoing and was revisited by AMD Linux Engineer Alex Deucher who explained the current lack of progress.

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Yeah I saw this article the other day on Phoronix and I was very surprised. I had no idea that you couldn't get HDMI 2.1with open-source drivers! One of the best things about Intel and AMD GPUs is how well they work with everything in Linux because the drivers are open-source. nVidia's closed-source proprietary drivers are very good, but also a real pain in the @ss. They don't work very well within the Linux ecosystem. I'm suffering with them on Linux, stuck on X11 with a whole host of limitations and unable to use Wayland (among a bunch of other issues). But on my laptop with Intel iGPU I can use Wayland just fine. I'm wondering if Intel GPUs also can't use HDMI 2.1 since their drivers are also open-source. I guess this is the one time where nVidia drivers give you an advantage in Linux.

F*ck the HDMI Forum, buncha asshats.
 
DrezKill said:
I guess this is the one time where nVidia drivers give you an advantage in Linux.
Click to expand...
Yeah, somewhere in the gitlab forum threads someone said that NVIDIA is a member of HDMI Forum so it makes sense if they're a shareholder.
 
DrezKill said:
Yeah I saw this article the other day on Phoronix and I was very surprised. I had no idea that you couldn't get HDMI 2.1with open-source drivers! One of the best things about Intel and AMD GPUs is how well they work with everything in Linux because the drivers are open-source. nVidia's closed-source proprietary drivers are very good, but also a real pain in the @ss.
Click to expand...

That's so weird as I have the exact opposite experience. Other than closed hardware that comes with AMD GPUs (Like the Steam Deck for example) I have way better experience with getting Nvidia GPUs working on Linux for my needs than I do AMD. I don't mess with Intel GPUs (iGPU or their discrete GPUs).

I purposely don't buy AMD GPUs simply because nearly all of my hosts with GPUs run Linux.

This isn't to say that it's easy, as Nvidia can be a pain sometimes too, but I've had far better luck with getting Nvidia working than AMD.
 
DrezKill said:
nVidia's closed-source proprietary drivers are very good, but also a real pain in the @ss. They don't work very well within the Linux ecosystem. I'm suffering with them on Linux, stuck on X11 with a whole host of limitations and unable to use Wayland (among a bunch of other issues).
Click to expand...

KDE's Busy Week With Landing Explicit Sync & Many Other Changes - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com www.phoronix.com
"KWin explicit sync support was merged to much excitement. Wayland explicit sync support is coming together in the ecosystem for improving the NVIDIA proprietary driver support and making Wayland more robust in general."

pointieststick.com

This week in KDE: Explicit Sync

This week something big got merged: support for Explicit Sync on Wayland! What does this do? In a nutshell it allows apps to tell the compositor when to display frames on the screen, reducing laten…
pointieststick.com pointieststick.com
"In a nutshell it allows apps to tell the compositor when to display frames on the screen, reducing latency and graphical glitches. The effect should be particularly noticeable with NVIDIA GPUs, which only support this rendering style, and not having support for it on Wayland was the most common source of random graphical glitches and slowdowns."

Explicit sync

Recently news went around about explicit sync being merged into Wayland protocols, and in the wake of that I saw a lot of people having questions about it, and why it was such a big deal… So here’s a short-ish explanation of what it is, why it’s needed and what the benefits are over the old model.
zamundaaa.github.io
"...The proprietary NVidia driver doesn’t support implicit sync at all, and neither commonly used compositors nor the NVidia driver support the first explicit sync protocol, which means on Wayland you get significant flickering and frame pacing issues. The driver also ships with some workarounds, but they don’t exactly fix the problem either..."

"With the explicit sync protocol being implemented in compositors and very soon in Xwayland and the proprietary NVidia driver, all those problems will finally be a thing of the past, and the biggest remaining blocker for NVidia users to switch to Wayland will be gone."

Well, we'll see what happens...
 
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