Sent out this week were more Intel Xe driver feature patches to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month’s Linux 7.1 merge window.
Similar to other Intel graphics driver activity and Intel driver work elsewhere in the Linux kernel, this week’s Intel Xe driver pull brings more enablement work for next-gen Nova Lake P hardware. This goes along with other Nova Lake Linux enablement happening at large and for its very exciting Xe3P graphics. This week some new workarounds are added for Nova Lake P as well as platform-level stepping information.
Besides continuing to work on Xe3P / Nova Lake, the Intel Xe driver pull is notable this week for another new feature: VM_BIND DECOMPRESS. The new DECOMPRESS flag being added to the Linux DRM’s VM_BIND interface is for allowing in-place decompression support. The DECOMPRESS flag lets user-space indicate the desire for the graphics driver to perform on-device, in-place decompression for the GPU mapping.
There is already code pending for the Intel Compute Runtime to this new DECOMPRESS option. So far the Intel Xe driver is the only Linux DRM driver making use of this VM_BIND DECOMPRESS flag. For Intel hardware support it also only works on Xe2 and newer.
This pull also contains Intel’s work on RAS using generic Netlink. This has been discussed for years and finally coming to fruition in Linux 7.1.
“Introduces the DRM RAS infrastructure over generic netlink.
The new interface allows drivers to expose RAS nodes and their associated error counters to userspace in a structured and extensible way. Each drm_ras node can register its own set of error counters, which are then discoverable and queryable through netlink operations. This lays the groundwork for reporting and managing hardware error states in a unified manner across different DRM drivers.
Currently it only supports error-counter nodes. But it can be extended later.
The registration is also not tied to any drm node, so it can be used by accel devices as well.”
More details on this week’s Intel Xe driver feature changes for the Linux 7.1 merge window via this pull request>
