Intel today sent out a batch of new kernel graphics/display driver code for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.17 merge window opening in a few weeks. There is now DRM Panic support for the Intel i915 and Xe kernel drivers, Wildcat Lake “WCL” display enablement, and experimental flip queue support for Lunar Lake and Panther Lake hardware, among other changes coming for the Intel drivers in Linux 6.17.
In addition to this week’s Intel GT Next material for Linux 6.17 that included enabling DG1 graphics by default / out-of-the-box as a long overdue and forgotten change, today’s intel-drm-next pull request has some exciting changes as well.
First up, Linux 6.17 brings display support for upcoming Wildcat Lake hardware. Wildcat Lake is believed to be the successor to Intel Twin Lake in catering to ultra-mobile devices. Wildcat Lake is rumored to be coming in up to six CPU Core designs and with up to two Xe3 graphics cores — not nearly as exciting as the upcoming Panther Lake SoCs. Now with Linux 6.17 there is display support with the Intel Xe driver in enabling the new display IP.
Another notable addition is now having DRM Panic “drm_panic” support within the i915 and Xe drivers. The DRM Panic support for the Intel code has been worked on for a while and allows for “Blue/Black Screen of Death”, QR code error messages, and similar in the event of your Linux kernel running into show-stopping problems. Various other Direct Rendering Manager drivers have supported DRM Panic while now both Intel kernel graphics drivers are supporting it too.
This week’s drm-intel-next pull also provides an initial Flip Queue implementation. Flip Queue works with Lunar Lake and Panther Lake hardware but for now is disabled by default in the driver. Flip queue support allows for multiple future frames to be sent to the display controller queue for helping the CPU and portions of the GPU to move to a lower power state while those future frames are being presented.
This Intel Flip Queue support just works for Lunar Lake and Panther Lake SoCs and for now requires using the “enable_flipq” kernel module parameter for actually enabling this experimental support.
There are also bug fixes and other changes as noted in today’s drm-intel-next pull request. The Linux 6.17 merge window should be opening up around late July or early August.
