On top of enabling Xe3P graphics for Nova Lake and Crescent Island plus other changes like CASF adaptive sharpening for Lunar Lake and newer, another set of Intel kernel graphics driver updates were merged overnight as a big win for the open-source Intel graphics stack on Linux.
Following the main Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) pull request, a secondary set of changes were submitted and merged specific to the Intel driver code. There was some late Intel driver code for enabling plane color management support that was just submitted recently but since it’s for new functionality and tieing into the new API of Linux 6.19, it was allowed late. Plus the Intel Xe VFIO driver is new and was intended for Linux 6.19 rather than waiting for v6.20/v7.0. Since the Intel Xe VFIO driver is new, it shouldn’t risk breaking things. Thus David Airlie submitted the secondary pull request and Linus Torvalds happily pulled the code for Linux 6.19 (unlike the Gaudi 3 snafu).
The main DRM pull request introduced the DRM Color Pipeline API that has been in the works for years thanks to Valve, Igalia working on it thanks to Valve funding, AMD, and others. That initial code provided integration with the AMDGPU graphics driver and the Virtual KMS (VKMS) driver. This secondary set of code now provides color management integration on the Intel driver side with the i915 and Xe driver code.
The other bit is introducing the VFIO Xe PCI driver. The Xe Virtual Function I/O (VFIO) driver is needed for use with SR-IOV for GPU virtualization. That driver is further explained in the prior article Intel Posts Patches For New VFIO Xe PCI Linux Driver.
It’s a great merge and big win for open-source Intel graphics on Linux and further making Linux 6.19 very heavy overall when it comes to kernel graphics driver improvements.
