With the increased popularity of Steam Deck/SteamOS, another batch of patches has been landed to enhance AMD KMS colour pipeline for Steam Deck/SteamOS by exposing the large set of colour caps available in AMD display hardware, this being the second attempt following the Request for Comments by Melissa Wen, Joshua Ashton, and Harry Wentland in April. The objective of this work is to get Linux to support HDR since the Steam Deck work will be for the external screen handling. This work targets Steam Deck/SteamOS with Gamescope, which will benefit to get the overall stack working elsewhere.
Melissa Wen, Joshua Ashton, and Harry Wentland have removed the KConfig option in this patch set to keep it behind the driver-specific AMD_PRIVATE_COLOR property. Although the Steam Deck itself does not have an HDR screen, this work will undoubtedly lend itself to the overall stacking as it will be exciting to see more upstream support for HDR and colour management land soon.
Moreover, according to Nate Graham’s usual overview, the first parts of the work have landed in Plasma 6.0 for their Wayland session. A lot of moving parts are currently happening, but it is very exciting to see them moving in the right direction.
Xaver Hugl of KDE has been putting in plenty of work to get it all hooked up in Kwin. As the patches are working with GameScope on the Steam Deck, this will benefit the overall Linux stack in supporting HDR ending up with a vendor-neutral solution for all. The post highlights some of the work going on there.
In conclusion, with the enhanced AMD KMS colour pipeline, HDR support is expected to become more widely available in Linux. The work being done on Steam Deck/SteamOS will benefit other Linux systems. The patches for Xaver Hugl’s Kwin on KDE will continue until an all-inclusive vendor-neutral solution is achieved. All this is such a tremendous amount of work, and while it is still a work in progress, exciting progress is being made each day.
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According to https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/05/hdr-and-colour-management-for-amd-steam-deck-and-kde-plasma-coming-along/
The material in this article is written on the basis of another article.