NVIDIA’s Nouveau Driver On Linux Reportedly Won’t Face Trouble With HDMI 2.1 Integration

NVIDIA's Linux open-source graphics driver Nouveau will not face much trouble with HDMI 2.1 integration, as AMD witnesses a setback in this department.

For those unaware, the HDMI Forum, a firm responsible for maintaining HDMI standards, rejected AMD's request for public access to HDMI 2.1 functionality, meaning the platform was deprived of the standard for over three years. Despite being released several years ago, Team Red has faced hindrances in enabling the standard with the AMD graphics driver on Linux; however, in the case of NVIDIA, things look seamless.

The HDMI Forum has rejected our proposal unfortunately. At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements.

Alex Deucher via FreeDesktop.org

According to the Red Hat developer and Nouveau contributor Karol Herbst, the driver is in the ready stages to adopt HDMI 2.1 since the graphics driver isn't open-source; hence, Team Green's development team has been involved in the process as well.

Even though AMD might not be able to add support for HDMI 2.1, nouveau certainly will as Nvidia's open source driver _also_ supports HDMI 2.1 so there is no reason to believe that at least some drivers can't support HDMI 2.1

It's quite backwards, but apparently having all the logic inside firmware (like Nvidia does) will probably help us implementing support for HDMI 2.1.

- Karol Herbst via Mastadon

NVIDIA's HDMI 2.1 integration is yet to occur with Nouveau, and the firm would adopt a similar approach to what they did with their Linux kernel driver, which involved using "GSP firmware blobs." However, things at AMD's camp do look gloomy right now, with the firm stuck due to their open-source approach, but you can expect a breakthrough soon, given the development team's activeness over the past few months.

News Source: Phoronix