Intel Begins Readying Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 6.1 - More DG2/Alchemist Work

Intel open-source engineers have readied their first batch of "drm-intel-gt-next" changes for DRM-Next of material they are preparing for introduction with the Linux 6.1 kernel cycle later this year.

A large focus of the Intel engineering work for their i915 kernel graphics driver is around the still-maturing DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics support, including work like with Arctic Sound M and the consumer Arc Graphics discrete graphics cards. (Stay tuned tomorrow for my initial Linux overview of Arc Graphics A380 on Linux.) With today's initial batch of kernel graphics driver changes intended for Linux 6.1, there is yet more DG2/Alchemist enablement work.

I'll have Arc Graphics A380 Linux information and benchmarks beginning to flow out tomorrow.

With this pull DG2 has performance tuning setting adjustments, the GuC firmware is updated against v70.4.1 for the hardware's graphics micro-controller, and an additional workaround. As of the current Intel Git code, the DG2/Alchemist graphics support remains flagged experimental and thus disabled by default unless using a module option to override the support. We'll see in the coming weeks if the support will remain experimental for Linux 6.1 or if the code is far enough along they will remove the experimental flag still ahead of the v6.1 merge window opening up in early October.

In addition to the DG2 enablement work that is ongoing, there is also improvements to the TLB invalidation code to deal with performance regressions, improved debugging of GuC errors, routing semaphores to GuC on Gen12+ when active, avoiding a possible system freeze when removing shared locking on freeing objects, and various other fixes.

The full list of Intel kernel graphics driver patches beginning to collect for Linux 6.1 can be found via this drm-next pull request.