Intel Submits Last Bits For Linux 5.5 DRM Driver - Includes More TGL/Gen12, Discrete Bit

Intel's open-source crew has submitted the last of their feature updates to their "i915" Direct Rendering Manager graphics driver for staging in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.5 kernel cycle.

In the previous weeks they've been bringing up a lot of their Tiger Lake / Gen12 graphics code as the dominating theme for the Linux 5.5 kernel. There has also been Jasper Lake support, Xe multi-GPU prepping, and their other routine code clean-ups and driver improvements. Out this morning is the last of their feature work targeting Linux 5.5.

Today's pull request does bring a new user-space API for cleaning up of long-running graphics workloads for after the process is killed. Basically when running Ctrl+C on a compute process, the user-space API can indicate to the graphics driver to ensure the hardware state gets cleaned up, among other related use-cases.

There is also half-float frame-buffer support and other preparations for discrete Xe graphics, but the bulk of the patches are still around the general Tiger Lake / Gen12 enablement.

The Tiger Lake / Gen12 work in today's pull include perf support, HuC firmware handling, and other features being wired up for these next-gen CPUs said to be launching in H2'2020.

When it comes to the ongoing preparations for Intel's "Xe" discrete graphics cards initially launching in 2020, added to the driver code now is "is_dgfx" for indicating parts that are discrete graphics as for now at least they fall under the same "Gen" handling so there's this new bit for indicating if discrete or integrated graphics. As part of that is also now GEN12_DGFX_FEATURES for indicating the Gen12 discrete-specific features in future kernel updates.

The newest patches for Linux 5.5 are in drm-intel-next. The Linux 5.5 cycle will kick off later this month but that next kernel version won't debut as stable until we are into the new year.