Incomplete Ponte Vecchio Support Being Dropped From Intel's i915 Linux Kernel Driver

Intel Linux graphics driver engineers are doing a bit of house keeping to the i915 DRM driver and removing some pre-production hardware bits as well as the incomplete Ponte Vecchio support.

A set of patches were sent out today that drop some old, pre-production Haswell code. There were still a few lines of code around early software development vehicles (SDVs) for Haswell and that's being cleared out since it's unused by the Intel Haswell processors that actually shipped.

Another patch goes ahead and drops the XeHP software development vehicle support for that pre-production hardware for what became Arctic Sound (ATS). With XeHP SDV being just an early development platform, some 200+ lines of driver code specific to that early hardware bring-up can be removed.

The other element of this driver cleaning is removing of Ponte Vecchio support. The commit explains:

"PVC support will not be coming to i915 so get rid of its partial enablement and reduce the driver maintenance burden."

While the i915 kernel driver supports DG2/Alchemist GPUs and there was a lot of enablement work that happened for Ponte Vecchio, it wasn't clear how well off the driver support was for Ponte Vecchio without having any hardware access or reports of its overall status. It turns out the driver code in i915 was only partially enabled and is now being removed.

So presumably Intel is focusing Ponte Vecchio entirely on the yet-to-be-merged Xe DRM kernel driver... Hopefully the Intel Xe DRM kernel driver will make it to the mainline kernel soon, at least as an experimental option. Ponte Vecchio is available in the form of the Intel Data Center GPU Max 1100 and Data Center GPU Max 1550 cards.

This driver cleaning work is currently on the mailing list and given the timing still has the possibility of being worked into the upcoming Linux 6.7 kernel cycle.