Intel Has Many Improvements For The Xe Graphics Driver In Linux 6.10
The Intel Xe Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver continues coming together nicely since its experimental introduction in Linux 6.8. Xe remains experimental but Intel continues to work toward having this modern kernel graphics driver ready for use with Lunar Lake processors out-of-the-box. Linux 6.9 added more feature code to the initial Xe driver and now for Linux 6.10 there's yet more features being wired up for addressing the gap with the i915 driver as well as continuing to prep for next-generation Xe2 graphics and more.
On the user-space API (uAPI) side there is now a query for obtaining the HuC micro-controller firmware version and other additions. Most exciting for end-users is likely the HWMON support now exposed by the Xe driver for hardware monitoring. Similar to the i915 driver, via the HWMON sysfs the Xe driver can now expose the discrete graphics card power use and energy metrics.
There is also new Xe2 workarounds and other Xe2 preparations for Lunar Lake integrated graphics and the Battlemage discrete graphics cards. It's with Xe2 where the Xe driver will aim to be the default Linux kernel driver in use rather than the i915 driver.
This code for Linux 6.10 also has the initial Xe driver preparations for SR-IOV support. The SR-IOV support isn't yet complete but it's working in that direction for this important virtualization feature.
Similar to the i915 driver adding PCI IDs for the Arc A750E Graphics and Arc A580E Graphics, the Xe driver also adds in those new device PCI IDs for Linux 6.10.
Rounding out the notable additions is some Xe2 HPG tuning for this next kernel cycle. The dozens of other patches found in this pull are of bug fixes and other low-level driver changes.
See the drm-xe-next pull request for this big batch of new Intel Xe driver changes slated for next month's Linux 6.10 merge window.
8 Comments
