Sent out today was the latest drm-misc-next pull request of various Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) changes queuing up ahead of the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle. Most exciting this week is the DRM boot logger being queued for landing to better present kernel messages.
Being developed by Red Hat’s Jocelyn Falempe as part of the work on the DRM Panic infrastructure is “drm_log” as a new kernel message boot logger. This effort was covered a few months ago on Phoronix within DRM_Log Continues To Be Worked On As New Boot Logger For Kernel Messages.
This new DRM_Log code is just about rendering kernel messages to the screen and not handling user input or any other extra functionality better accomplished by user-space. This log viewer by design doesn’t allow scrolling past kernel messages, uses the non-blocking console API so it’s compatible with real-time “RT” kernels, works with all DRM drivers, and intended to just get the job done until a user-space solution is ready to take over after boot.
One nice ability with this drm_log code is integer scaling support for increasing the text size as desired for dealing with modern HiDPI displays. The integer scaling support can be handled via the kernel boot options such as “drm_log.scale=3”.
This new boot logger code is part of the drm-misc-next pull request for Linux 6.14. This week’s pull also has some AMDXDNA accelerator driver changes to use better power management helpers, device status reporting for AIE2 devices, support for querying the Ryzen AI NPU firmware version, and other fixes. The pull request also adds a new Synopsys MIPI-DSI2 host controller bridge driver and new Multi-Inno Technology MI0700A2T-30 and AUO G084SN05 V9 panel drivers. Lastly this pull request brings MIPI DSI support for the Rockchip RK3588 and HDMI0 support for this SoC as well.
