The Direct Rendering Manager “DRM” pull request ended up leading to Linus Torvalds complaining over text and Rust code formatting but in the end he pulled all of these kernel graphics driver updates and also the associated “accel” accelerator subsystem drivers too.
With the Linux 6.18 DRM pull there is a lot of kernel graphics driver improvements across the board, including the new drivers of Tyr and the Rocket accelerator driver. For enhancing existing driver support, the AMD and Intel graphics drivers continue seeing a bulk of the activity. Plus ongoing Rust code work in the DRM subsystem and more.
Below is a look at the DRM kernel driver changes for Linux 6.18.
– The “Rocket” accelerator driver is finally mainlined for enabling the NPU found on newer Rockchip SoCs. This is the open-source driver reverse-engineered and started by Tomeu Vizoso. The Rocket accel driver works with new user-space code in Mesa 25.3 for Rockchip NPUs.
– The AMDGPU and AMDKFD Checkpoint and Resture “CRIU” support for GEM memory objects.
– Expanded AMDGPU Video Core Next “VCN” engine reset support.
– More AMD Cyan Skillfish updates.
– Improvements for AMD GCN 1.0 GPUs on the AMDGPU driver.
– The AMDXDNA accelerator driver now supports user-space allocated buffers, improved error reporting, and other enhancements.
– A new Intel Xe driver interface for querying VMA count and memory attributes.
– The intel Intel SLPC “power_profile” sysfs interface for the Xe driver for power management tuning.
– Intel Xe driver SR-IOV support for CCS surfaces on Xe2+. The SR-IOV PF mode is also now enabled by default on supported platforms.
– Intel Wildcat Lake display enabling.
– Intel has returned to working on the upstream Habana Labs accelerator driver. There still is no Gaudi 3 support but at least they are back to working on this code under a new set of maintainers.
– Intel Xe driver support for madvise in GPU SVM (Shared Virtual Memory).
– The Nouveau driver now defaults to using the NVIDIA GSP firmware.
– The Arm Mali Panthor DRM driver added support for Mali G710, G510, G310, Gx15, Gx20, Gx25 GPUs.
– VESA DRM 8-bit color palette support.
– Continued work on Nova as the next-generation open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver written in Rust.
– The initial code around Tyr as a new Rust driver for Arm Mali GPUs. It’s not yet usable by end-users, similar to the Nova driver.
– Various new Rust abstractions and other work toward making Rust DRM drivers more practical.
See this pull for the full list of DRM feature patches this cycle.
