Despite the fact that the Linux desktop has improved a lot over the course of the past decade, it still has some important shortcomings compared to Windows, such as the lack of support HDR . Fortunately, this could change in the not too distant future, as Red Hat has announced that it wants to hire an engineer to introduce HDR support in Fedora and RHEL.
In the job we read that “the engineering team at Red Hat Workstation is looking for a senior software engineer with experience working in desktop support, composer and GPU formats and screens high dynamic range ( HDR) for Linux . In this role, he will work in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) New Platform Technologies Enablement team, maintaining and enhancing the GPU stack within RHEL and Fedora and contributing to upstream graphics development ” .
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Obviously, saying Red Hat and Fedora suggests other things, such as that the work to support HDR will focus on the GNOME desktop environment, because as those who follow the news of this world will well know, Red Hat, Fedora and GNOME form the triangle most popular of the Linux spectrum.
With an Xorg that was sentenced a year ago by Red Hat , another point that can be drawn from the offer is that future HDR support for GNOME will focus on Wayland , a protocol that, despite whoever it may be, is the future of deployment graphics on Linux. In fact, in the section on responsibilities you can read the following: “Contribute to the improvements of functions and the correction of errors in the main subsystems such as the Linux kernel, Wayland and GNOME to support the implementation of HDR in Linux” .
Implementing HDR support in Linux is an old dream that, with the standard stack and Xorg at least, has not materialized. The situation is apparently not easy to solve due to the disparity between the components, which also include the different existing drivers for the graphics and the diversity of the composers. The fact that the use of HDR screens is not very widespread among Open Source developers does not help either.
The complexity involved in supporting HDR led Wayland’s managers to propose a standardized library for the analysis of EDID blobs (Extended Screen Identification Data) , since each composer was supporting this feature in a different way. EDID blob analysis is becoming important for features like HDR and other advanced color-related features.
Seeing the circumstances surrounding this job offer, everything indicates that Fedora will be the first distribution to have HDR support through GNOME, something that at this point should not be surprising as the Red Hat community distribution is the great promoter of technologies linked to Linux.
1 Comment
Let’s hope they don’t brew their own implementation. Because work on wayland seems in progress since a while, here:https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/wayland/wayland-protocols/-/merge_requests/14