New Intel DRM Code For Testing, Material For Linux 4.15

Intel developers have published a new round of drm-intel-testing updates for those developers or enthusiasts wishing to begin testing this in-progress code for the Intel Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver with this code eventually being queued for the Linux 4.15 cycle.

New material for testing in this Intel DRM kernel tree are more Cannonlake graphics workarounds, infoframe refactoring, the kernel bits needed so the Intel Mesa driver can expose ARB_timer_query, restoring GPU clock boosts on missed page-flip vblanks, and a variety of fixes and other code improvements.

There is a lot of low-level code improvements and fixes at this stage for the Intel DRM driver. For end-users it's good to see the Cannonlake support getting into shape for the post-(KBL-R / Coffee Lake) CPUs in the months ahead. Cannonlake brings with it "Gen 10" graphics that should be much more capable than current Gen 9 Intel HD/UHD Graphics. Also for end-users is the necessary work for ARB_timer_query support: this extension exposes accurate timing information for how long it takes to complete a set of OpenGL commands so games/applications can make more accurate decisions based upon that information rather than less accurate timing approaches.

The list of changes can be found via this mailing list post. The DRM Intel testing tree is found via this Git branch.