Red Hat wants to work on better HDR and VRR support in the coming years

Red Hat plans to work on support for high dynamic range on Linux in the next two years. The developers are organizing a hackathon to come up with a plan of action for how to integrate hdr into the Gnome desktop environment.

A number of Red Hat developers write on their wiki that they want to meet later this year in Brno in the Czech Republic for an event called Shell & Display Next. This is a hackathon in which the developers want to work on a roadmap to incorporate HDR, but also VRR and other GPU technologies into the operating system. In addition, improvements to the Kernel Model Settings and Wayland APIs for Red Hat are also being worked on, the makers say. They must be updated in such a way that it becomes easier for end users to play with those settings, which is especially important for HDR support. Not only developers from Red Hat will be present during the hackathon, but also from Valve, Intel, AMD and Nvidia and from KDE.

The developers mainly want to draw up a roadmap for the next one to two years. In addition to HDR, the developers also want better support for variable refresh rate or VRR in the distro, but ‘future GPU technologies’ must also be made available to users via Mutter or Shell. The developers want to focus specifically on imaging technologies that require the Gnome shell along with the GPU stack in Linux. HDR is the prime example of that, they say. “The hackfest is designed to bring together developers from the display to GPU stacks, including developers from freedesktop and those working on the upstream kernel.”

If the Red Hat hackathon is successful, other distros using Gnome as a shell could potentially benefit as well. HDR support on Linux has long been a wish of many developers, including those at Valve. Developers recently showed images of games that ran on Linux with HDR support.