The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been submitted for the Linux 6.13 merge window in bringing many updates to the open-source kernel graphics/display drivers as well as the accelerator subsystem.
There is a lot of new DRM graphics driver feature code in Linux 6.13. As usual much of it revolves around Intel and AMD Radeon driver improvements but there is also work elsewhere, including on enabling the Intel Panther Lake NPU in the accelerator space. The Raspberry Pi graphics performance also now has the potential of enjoying some nice performance benefits.
Linux 6.13 DRM highlights include:
– Initial Panther Lake display support and other early enablement work around Xe3 graphics that will be found with next-gen Panther Lake processors for their integrated graphics. Expect more Xe3 enablement to come in the next few kernel cycles.
– Continued code improvements in the Xe kernel driver for the Intel Xe2 graphics with the Lunar Lake integrated graphics and upcoming Battlemage discrete graphics processors. Among the Xe2 work in Linux 6.13 is enabling the ultra-joiner functionality for both Battlemage and Lunar Lake graphics. PXP GuC auto-teardown is also now enabled.
– Additional Intel Arrow Lake PCI device IDs added.
– The Xe driver continues seeing preparations around SR-IOV support for virtualization.
– The AMDGPU driver now offers SDMA queue reset support for making it more robust.
– The AMDGPU driver also rolls out runtime re-partitioning support.
– Radeon RX 7000 series graphics cards can now easily toggle the “Zero RPM” feature.
– The Intel 5th Gen NPU to be found with Panther Lake processors is enabled within the IVPU accelerator driver.
– The Rockchip DRM driver has 4K@60Hz display enablement work.
– The V3D DRM driver for Raspberry Pi hardware now has big/super pages support for better graphics performance on the Raspberry Pi.
– The Nouveau kernel driver now supports the DRM Panic handling on NVIDIA NV50 GPUs and newer.
See the DRM pull request for the full list of patches this cycle.
Notably absent from this pull request is the AMD XDNA accelerator driver for the Ryzen API NPUs still not ready for debuting in the mainline “accel” subsystem. There is also still no sign of the Gaudi 3 accelerator driver code from Intel yet, contrary to their previous comments to me to expect it in October. There is also nothing this cycle for upstream with the NVIDIA NOVA DRM kernel driver or the Rust-written Apple kernel graphics driver.
