It doesn&#x27;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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalfoundry.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;2026&#x2F;06&#x2F;valves-hdmi-2-1-saga-is-fully-resolved-with-a-final-frl-update-to-come-for-full-4k-240hz-support" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.digitalfoundry.net&#x2F;news&#x2F;2026&#x2F;06&#x2F;valves-hdmi-2-1-...</a>

IIRC, a non-AMD contributor was working on adding HDMI 2.1 support to Linux&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;t really care anymore I guess.

what even is the alleged crime? If there was any protected IP they would be able to use the courts to sue. But that isn&#x27;t happening, which suggests they know they don&#x27;t have grounds. Am I missing something? Patents seem to be very much still grounds for lawsuits (even relatively baseless patents)

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

Happily upvoting you for agreeing on principal with me. I shall likely join the flogging as a result.I’m sure it will hurt my 11k internet point account.

White collar crime is legal now so IP violation is a pretend concept.Update - Happily eating the downvotes on this one.

Does anyone understand how HDMI 2.1 support is now no problem? I remember that 2.1 support in AMD&#x27;s open source driver was blocked by the HDMI forum, but I haven&#x27;t heard any news about them unblocking it. What changed?

I clicked this one with no hype. I am now exited to update the kernel of my raspberry pi 4.

I look for wake from sleep fixes, nvidia the primary offender there (they have at least two bugs affecting it across several driver versions). But my intel wifi driver (BE200) also has an apparent hard lock on wake. Looks like this particular release doesn&#x27;t have any fixes for me, though claude says its not the full change list.

As a long time desktop and server user, why do I look at changelogs...New filesystems and major changes to existing ones (large performance improvements, new features like adding better compression standards which I now know I can use, fixes to long-standing bugs which open new use cases).New protocols like wireguard when it was new and exciting (still is now that I think of it). When that was mainlined, I knew I had some network rearchitecting to do.New device drivers like amdgpu when it was massive news. Less so these days since most hardware is well supported, and I don&#x27;t buy the absolute latest.New kernel APIs which I can use in my programs — like landlock, when it was merged I knew it was time to improve sandboxing in some of my stuff.Though LWN and kernel newbies do it best, already linked by others.

This isn&#x27;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).<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kernelnewbies.org&#x2F;LinuxChanges" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kernelnewbies.org&#x2F;LinuxChanges</a><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kernelnewbies.org&#x2F;LinuxVersions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;kernelnewbies.org&#x2F;LinuxVersions</a>

It only covers changes made by Igalia devs. For a more general changelog I’d recommend the LWN articles:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;1078068&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;1078068&#x2F;</a>
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;1078539&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;lwn.net&#x2F;Articles&#x2F;1078539&#x2F;</a>

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

It&#x27;s a well-formatted changelog of the most salient features of the release. Linus doesn&#x27;t provide one apart from a list of added commits and merged branches, which isn&#x27;t very useful unless you are a kernel developer.

I&#x27;d say mostly sys admins type users that want to stay on top of things?I install Linux on a wide variety of hardware for both work and personal reasons.I don&#x27;t read the detailed changelogs religiously but after years of paying some attention to them I can understand most of it and see where the industry is investing developer efforts, what cool new hardware is gaining support and what new security or performance features people are focusing on.

I think it is mostly &quot;marketing&quot; for Igalia&#x27;s services. If you want to pay people to do &quot;stuff&quot; in Linux and adjacent projects like Mesa, Igalia seems very competent.

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

ty. so very narrow audicence it seems.Per @sph, as Linus provide no changelog, seems like the firm is putting it together for others

I don&#x27;t think there is much too it, it&#x27;s a consulting firm. Would you hire a consulting firm with an empty tech blog portifolio? It&#x27;s ticking a box, it&#x27;s stating it&#x27;s a consulting firm in tech, that it&#x27;s target audience are companies with Linux machines etc...

It&#x27;s more than that: free and open support for HDMI 2.1 in general. Previously it was only proprietary implementations that didn&#x27;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&#x27;t work around the problem by converting HDMI to DisplayPort in a proprietary on-board GPU chip.

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

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

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?

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

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

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

HDMI 2.1 carries more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4. Plenty of GPU&#x2F;monitors have that port arrangement, as recent as Nvidia&#x27;s RTX 40 Series.

Because your motherboard only supports HDMI. The last three I used had HDMI, and sometimes VGA.

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.

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&#x27;ve never even considered using HDMI for my Desktop.

People who want to play video games, or watch videos using hardware decoding, or train machine learning models? DRM here means <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Direct_Rendering_Manager" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Direct_Rendering_Manager</a>&gt; 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.&gt; 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.

Here it doesn’t mean “digital rights management”, but “Direct Rendering Manager”, a component of the kernel’s graphics stack: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.kernel.org&#x2F;gpu&#x2F;?utm_source=chatgpt.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;docs.kernel.org&#x2F;gpu&#x2F;?utm_source=chatgpt.com</a>

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

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

The Direct Rendering Manager is useful for any Linux user who wants to display things on a monitor (unless you&#x27;re happy with like 640x480 VESA, in which case maybe you don&#x27;t need it)

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

DRM refers to Direct Rendering Manager in this context.

DRM = Direct Rendering Manager. GPU scheduling.

its the Direct Rendering Manager, not the other DRM

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

Linux 7.2