One of the interesting new features merged to the Linux kernel last year was the DRM Panic infrastructure so that Linux can display an error screen akin to Windows’ “Blue Screen of Death” when encountering problems. With follow-on kernel releases it’s been extended to add QR code error messages and other improvements. But DRM Panic does require the support/cooperation of the different Direct Rendering Manager drivers and so far Intel graphics haven’t been supported.
Over the past year with this DRM Panic infrastructure gaining new features, distributions like Fedora taking on its interest, and more of the upstream DRM kernel drivers have made the necessary changes to enable its support. With newer kernels there’s support for AMD graphics and NVIDIA graphics with Nouveau, among the smaller DRM drivers having support for it too. But the Intel i915/Xe kernel driver code has been notably absent.
Patches began last year for DRM Panic support for Intel and that effort remains ongoing. Red Hat’s Jocelyn Falempe today posted tge seventh iteration of the patches for enabling DRM Panic support for Intel graphics hardware. These patches have been tested across different Intel graphics hardware from iGPUs with Haswell and Comet Lake to Raptor Lake and Lunar Lake.
There are more fixes in these v7 patches and hopefully they’ll be all good to go for upstreaming soon for allowing DRM Panic use on Intel graphics hardware.
