It doesn't give any specifics about what changed on the HDMI Forum side, but this article [0] from June indicates that Valve worked closely with AMD to get it pushed through prior to the release of the Steam Machine (which supports HDMI 2.1 VRR).

[0] https://www.digitalfoundry.net/news/2026/06/valves-hdmi-2-1-...

As far as I can recall: some internal implementation documentation leaked which made the legal position tougher for them somehow to protect it as proprietary (it made sense when I heard it explained, but now I feel like I'm missing an important detail to that), and then Valve had some talks with the HDMI Forum to convince them to let it go, presumably so they could have such support integrated into Linux for their hardware (Deck, Machine, Frame, etc).

So now the HDMI Forum just doesn't really care anymore I guess.

White collar crime is legal now so IP violation is a pretend concept.

Update - Happily eating the downvotes on this one.

It's a well-formatted changelog of the most salient features of the release. Linus doesn't provide one apart from a list of added commits and merged branches, which isn't very useful unless you are a kernel developer.

I think it is mostly "marketing" for Igalia's services. If you want to pay people to do "stuff" in Linux and adjacent projects like Mesa, Igalia seems very competent.

hi audience, we know about this stuff you use on a daily basis, you may be interested in our executive summary of the latest release of the stuff

I don't think there is much too it, it's a consulting firm. Would you hire a consulting firm with an empty tech blog portifolio? It's ticking a box, it's stating it's a consulting firm in tech, that it's target audience are companies with Linux machines etc...

I for one am excited about HDMI 2.1 support on AMD.

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If you’re using a TV. They rarely have DP ports.

HDMI 2.1 carries more bandwidth than DisplayPort 1.4. Plenty of GPU/monitors have that port arrangement, as recent as Nvidia's RTX 40 Series.

HDMI is a king on consumer TVs. Linux (in form of SteamOS) is becoming a major console gaming platform thanks to Valve.

I have been using HDMI to game on TV for most or all of my adult life. Mostly console gaming. A few years back I built a dedicated gaming rig, but I still use it with a controller from my couch connected to a TV.

So this is a win for couch gamers and open source in general.

Sounds like an AI comment.

Here it doesn’t mean “digital rights management”, but “Direct Rendering Manager”, a component of the kernel’s graphics stack: https://docs.kernel.org/gpu/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

People who want to play video games, or watch videos using hardware decoding, or train machine learning models? DRM here means https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Rendering_Manager

> DRM exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations such as configuring the mode setting of the display.

> User-space programs can use the DRM API to command the GPU to do hardware-accelerated 3D rendering and video decoding, as well as GPGPU computing.

The Direct Rendering Manager is useful for any Linux user who wants to display things on a monitor (unless you're happy with like 640x480 VESA, in which case maybe you don't need it)

This is DRM as in Direct Rendering Manager, which is the kernel interface to GPU hardware; not Digital Rights Management.

Different DRM, the one in the kernel is Direct Rendering Manager, which is basically managing access to the GPU.

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DRM refers to Direct Rendering Manager in this context.

DRM = Direct Rendering Manager. GPU scheduling.

its the Direct Rendering Manager, not the other DRM