Display Port runtime reconfiguration in The Linux Graphics Stack

This proposal has been rejected.

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One Line Summary

Display Port Compliance requires that kernel drivers, hot-plug events, video modesetting and the userspace compositors/desktop environment all work together to handle a link failure. How did we achieve this in upstream Linux?

Abstract

Ever hooked up a Linux Computer to a monitor only to experience…nothing? DP is very far from a dumb cable and requires that the entire graphics stack works together to handle mode failures and recover them. The Linux Kernel’s atomic modesetting infrastructure on the other hand is a daunting beast of its own and understanding how all the pieces interact is a challenge in itself.

In this talk Manasi will share her findings about the loophole in atomic kernel modesetting that caused black screen issues with Display Port on Linux. She will present the ultimate technical solution implemented across kernel, DRM and userspace compositors for DP compliance ensuring a successful modeset almost every time it is requested by user that was recently upstreamed. She will also share her journey as a newbie through iterating designs, working together with the upstream maintainers, learning how KMS works and finally upstreaming this cross-component graphics solution.

Tags

linux, graphics, DisplayPort, Atomic Kernel Modesetting, Link-training, Hot-plugs

Speaker

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    Biography

    Manasi Navare holds a Masters Degree in Computer Engineering from University of Colorado. She works as a Graphics Kernel Developer at Intel’s Open Source technology center. In this role, Manasi has been mainly contributing to the I915 graphics driver as well as some of the media drivers like Libva, Libyami and OpenCL Bignet. Over last year or so, she has made significant contributions to the upstream i915 Graphics driver, redesigning link training algorithm to achieve DP compliance on Linux, enabling multi stream video through DP MST.