Introduced in Linux 7.1 is a dedicated CRTC background color property for DRM graphics/display drivers. The "BACKGROUND_COLOR" property can be used with capable drivers and display controllers as the default background color when not covered by any plane or from transparent regions of higher planes. With the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel cycle, the Intel DRM driver will begin supporting this background color property.

For solid backgrounds rather than painting the background, setting the DRM BACKGROUND_COLOR property can be set for reduced video memory bandwidth usage with solid backgrounds.

Going all the way back to 2018, Intel open-source driver engineers have been working on exposing a pipe background color property with their hardware since the Intel Skylake "Gen9" integrated graphics and newer days having this CRTC capability for a background/canvas color below the programmable planes. Now that there is BACKGROUND_COLOR in the mainline Linux kernel, they finally have a patch ready to cross the finish line.

This background color property support was sent out as part of yesterday's drm-intel-next pull request of new material for Linux 7.2. Plus there has been other display code refactoring and other low-level driver improvements ready for this next version of the Linux kernel.