Intel Linux Display Driver Being Adapted For DRM Panic "Blue Screen of Death" Support

The DRM Panic infrastructure has been in the Linux kernel for several releases now and allows for a kernel-based experience similar to Windows' "Blue Screen of Death as well as more recently allowing QR code kernel error messages and other features. The Intel kernel DRM driver has seen some patches for enabling DRM Panic support.

DRM Panic support requires integration on the part of the kernel graphics/display drivers. There have been patches for AMD GPU support, NVIDIA GPU support with the Nouveau driver, and various smaller DRM drivers. With "request for comments" (RFC) patches posted last week, the Intel i915 display code can allow for DRM Panic support.

Jocelyn Falempe of Red Hat posted the patches for drm_panic support within the i915 DRM driver. Falempe explained:

"This is a first draft of drm_panic support for i915.

I've tested it on the 3 intel laptops I have at my disposal. one Haswell with 128MB of eDRAM, one Cometlake and one Alderlake.

I tested panic in both fbdev console and gnome desktop.

I still have an issue with Alderlake, and it doesn't work when in gnome desktop. If I disable tiling on a framebuffer using DPT, then it displays some other memory location. As DPT is enabled only for tiled framebuffer, there might be some hardware limitations?"

Those interested can find the RFC patches out for review on the dri-devel mailing list.