Now that the Linux 6.14 merge window has passed, new feature material aiming for the Linux 6.15 kernel is beginning to get ready for staging in DRM-Next ahead of that next merge window opening up around the end of March. Sent out today was the first batch of drm-misc-next changes for Linux 6.15 that include more work on DRM Panic for that Linux equivalent to Microsoft Windows’ “Blue Screen of Death” as well as changes to the other smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers.
The DRM Panic work primed already for introduction in Linux 6.15 includes updating its QR encoding against the FIDO 2.2 specification and adding panic support to the VirtIO GPU driver for virtualized environments.
Red Hat engineer Jocelyn Falempe explained of the FIDO 2.2 specification support for better binary encoding within DRM Panic’s QR error codes:
“The current encoding, is done by converting 13bits of input into 4 decimal digits, that are then encoded efficiently using the numeric encoding of the QR code specification.
The Fido v2.2 specification uses a similar approach for its QR-initiated authentication. The only difference is that it converts 7 bytes (56bits) of input into 17 decimal digits. The benefit is that the algorithm doesn’t require to split input bytes into 13bits chunk, and the ratio is a bit better.
This improvement was proposed by Jó Ágila Bitsch. drm_panic is still young, and the QR code feature is not widely used, so it’s still time to switch to a common algorithm, shared with a widely used standard.
I also changed the name of the url parameter, from zl= to z=, so the website can keep backward compatibility if needed.”
The VirtIO GPU DRM kernel driver now joins the growing list of other drivers compatible with this “Screen of Death” message screen on kernel errors or for showing a QR-coded error message.
In addition to the DRM Panic improvements, today’s drm-misc-next pull request also adds support for the Qualcomm QAIC accelerator driver for supporting AIC200 accelerators. Details are still light around the Qualcomm Cloud AI 200 “AIC200” accelerators but at least the open-source and upstream kernel driver support is ready. The drm-misc-next pull also adds support for Matrox G220eH5 hardware to the MGAG200 driver.
