Intel's Experimental Xe Driver For Linux Lacking HuC Media Support For DG2/Alchenist

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel's Experimental Xe Driver For Linux Lacking HuC Media Support For DG2/Alchenist

While Intel's in-development Xe kernel graphics driver is focused on supporting Tigerlake/Gen12 graphics and newer integrated/discrete graphics with this modern open-source driver with many design improvements over the aging i915 kernel driver, there looks to be one feature that as currently positioned will be missing for DG2/Alchemist: HuC support for helping with media offloading...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Xe-DG2-No-HuC

[RejectModernity]

I'm sorry, but IS THIS SOME FUCKING KIND OF JOKE? Time to sell my A770, since intel spits in my face and do not plan on fixing their shit. i915 wont support sparse residency and xe won't support HuC. LIKE WHAT THE FUCK???

[emansom]

Bad move. This renders the A380 completely useless for HTPC+light gaming use cases.

[darkbasic]

WTF? Definitely not going to buy an A380 for my ppc64 workstation because i915 does NOT work on anything but x86. These cards would have been plenty useful as av1 accelerators but as usual Intel drivers are a mess.

[Azrael]

Would it be possible to port HuC from i915? I don't think the drivers can coexist with each other?

I got an A380 for AV1 encoding

[RejectModernity]

Like wow, imagine buying an Intel GPU thinking that Intel Linux drivers are good and they will fix all problems for sure. YEAH FUCK YOU, your 1 year old GPU is already obsolete, go buy our new product.

[bezirg]

This is a terrible move. DG2/Alchemist now stands with one foot on one driver (i915) and the other foot on the new driver (xe). DG2/Alchemist desperately needs VM_BIND (which i915 does not offer); but the great added feature of this card is accelerated video encoding/decoding via the HuC (which xe does not want to offer).

I don't think you can at runtime switch between i915 , xe but I may be wrong.

[user1]

This is for all the geniuses who insist everyone should "vote with their feet" and buy Intel GPU's in order to save the discrete GPU market. I mean, yeah, the GPU market hasn't been in a worse state than the last few years, but at the end of the day I want a properly working product and not unexpectedly being bitten in the ass because of being an early adopter.

[ms178]

As I have seen similar behavior from Intel before with Sandy Bridge and OpenGL 3.3/3.2 that was never finished up in their Windows driver, I'd say they prove every sceptics right with this move. They'd need to go the extra mile here with DG2 to earn people's trust in their products, especially if it involves major features end users care about.

It remains to be seen if their next-gen products are any better. AMD exercised with Ryzen how it is done, the first generation had some flaws but was interesting enough, the second gen (not the +) was quite decent and the third generation was the one everyone wanted. Let's see if Intel will even produce interesting Celestial dGPUs.

[hartree]

That's disappointing to say the least, not what I expected at all. We're not talking about a 10-year-old product, it's their current first generation line-up that many including myself bought in part to support Intel's efforts, and under the assumption of having working media encoders since AV1 support was heavily marketed.