Intel engineers today sent out their final drm-xe-next feature pull request to DRM-Next of the remaining features they are ready to land for the modern Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with the upcoming Linux 6.15 cycle. It’s a big one.
Prior pull requests to DRM-Next for Linux 6.15 of Intel graphics driver material has already allowed for tuning the GuC SLPC profile, enabling PXP HWDRM, a “survivability mode” for the GPU, and GPU / VRAM temperature reporting as well as new performance optimizations and other tuning.
For capping off the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver feature work for Linux 6.15, it’s a big round of last minute updates. First up, the Intel Xe driver is finally ready with SVM! Yes, Shared Virtual Memory is now going to be mainlined for this modern Intel DRM driver! Shared Virtual Memory allows for the seamless sharing of mmeory between the CPU and GPU. SVM can help with performance as well as more flexible programming particularly for GPU compute workloads.
The Intel Xe SVM support has been a long time coming but is now all buttoned up and ready for introduction in Linux 6.15 as a significant new feature.
Another new feature that is part of today’s Xe pull request is EU Stall Sampling. The EU Stall Sampling feature was originally introduced for Ponte Vecchio GPUs but is now being supported across all Intel Xe2 GPUs and newer. This hardware feature allows capturing of execution unit (EU) stall data such as the instruction stalled and stall reason counts. This EU Stall Sapling can help debug performance issues and provide greater insight when an execution unit is stalled. There is a pending Mesa merge request for adding the user-space support to the Intel Mesa driver. This too has been another big feature that has been a long time coming for the Xe kernel driver.
Another new feature sent out today is allowing user-space to provide a low-latency hint to the GPU/driver. When this low-latency hint is set, the kernel driver will tell the GuC micro-controller and in turn should ramp the GT frequency every time it switches to the low-latency process. This has been shown to help for OpenCL workloads with lower kernel launch latency and other scenarios where needing low-latency execution for graphics workloads.
Today’s pull also provides per-engine activity reporting via the perf PMU, various fixes, and other last minute improvements ahead of the Linux 6.15 merge window opening later this month. See this pull request for the exciting last minute Xe driver feature changes coming to Linux 6.15.
