HDMI Forum not interested in open sourcing HDMI 2.1 driver

AMD gets a big ‘no’ from HDMI Forum 3 years later.

The open-source advocates should stick to DisplayPort. The HDMI features which are broken on Linux for AMD hardware connections will not be fixed, it seems. The HDMI Forum would have to allow AMD to share private HDMI data, something the organization doesn’t intend to do.

Phoronix has been reporting on HDMI 2.1 bugs that involved 4K@120Hz or 5K@240Hz configurations that were already mentioned 3 years ago. AMD has been seemingly able to resolve those issues after months of work, but in order to publish the fix AMD required an approval from HDMI Forum, who own the rights to this standard. Due to the nature of open-source drivers, that would also expose HDMI information to the public. The Forum has rejected such a request.

“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, AMD engineer

With HDMI Forum turning down this request, AMD cannot publish the fix. This means that HDMI 2.1+ features will not work with any open-source drivers. Phoronix reminds of a similar problem years ago that involved GPU video acceleration that could potentially compromise HDCP video restrictions.

Perhaps for this reason, modern graphics cards tend to prioritize royalty-free DisplayPort overs HDMI these days. However, the latter is still used by modern monitors, TVs and head-mounted displays.

Source: Phoronix