The Big DRM Updates For Linux 4.18: Intel Icelake, Vega M, Vega 20 & V3D

David Airlie, the subsystem maintainer for the Direct Rendering Manager, has submitted the big feature pull request today for the Linux 4.18 kernel. All of the DRM feature work yields a net gain of close to fifty-thousand lines of code for this cycle.

While we have covered most of the DRM changes already as they were being queued into DRM-Next, the significant changes for these display/graphics drivers in Linux 4.18 include:

- Initial enablement work on Intel Icelake "Gen 11" graphics that is the eventual successor to Cannonlake. It will likely be a few kernel cycles before the Icelake graphics support is squared away.

- The Intel driver has also received HDCP content protection improvements, DisplayPort MST fixes, GVT improvements, and more.

- Support in AMDGPU for the yet-to-be-launched Vega 20 GPU.

- Support in AMDGPU for the Vega M graphics hardware, the Radeon graphics found within Intel Kabylake-G processors.

- Vega power profile / clock voltage control improvements.

- The AMDKFD compute driver now has support for Vega/GFX9 discrete graphics cards, so the mainline kernel with Vega hardware can work with ROCm/OpenCL compute.

- The V3D driver has been added as the DRM driver formerly known as VC5. V3D supports the next-generation Broadcom VideoCore hardware that will hopefully one day end up in the Raspberry Pi boards to succeed VC4.

- Xen-front is a new DRM driver as a Xen hypervisor para-virtualized display front-end.

- Nouveau has initial Volta GV100 enablement work.

- Synchronization object support within the VC4 driver.

The complete list of changes can be found via the pull request. The DRM feature changes for Linux 4.18 amount to 1111 files changed, 72656 insertions, and 26340 deletions.