The Color Pipeline API, a years-in-the-making effort to bring proper HDR and advanced color management to Linux desktops, has been merged into the kernel's drm-misc-next branch. The work, driven by AMD, Igalia, Valve, and other stakeholders, focuses heavily on AMDGPU driver capabilities for recent Radeon GPUs, with much of the development aligned to Steam Deck and Steam Machine requirements.
For GPUs with DCN 3 or newer, AMD's implementation exposes an eight-stage color pipeline including 1D curve transformations for EOTF and inverse EOTF, a 3x4 color transformation matrix, a multiplier stage, 1D LUTs, and a tetrahedrally interpolated 17^3 3D LUT. The supported transfer functions include sRGB EOTF, PQ EOTF scaled to 0.0-125.0, BT.2020/BT.709 OETF, and Gamma 2.2, along with their inverses. Initial implementations cover both the AMDGPU driver and the Virtual KMS driver for testing.
Due to merge window timing, the feature will likely miss the Linux 6.19 cycle opening next week and instead land in what may become Linux 7.0 when that merge window opens in February 2026. Wayland compositors including Valve's Gamescope, KDE KWin, and Weston have already been implementing support in anticipation of this API reaching stable kernels by mid-2026.