In addition to the SR-IOV work for the Intel Xe driver that landed in Linux 6.17 with a focus on Battlemage, additional SR-IOV work is coming for the Linux 6.18 cycle. Plus a variety of other Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes too.
Sent out a few days ago was the initial batch of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes intended for Linux 6.18. The v6.18 merge window should be open by early October and the stable release then in December. At least one more Xe pull request of new feature material for Linux 6.18 is still expected in the coming weeks, but the recent pull request added the following changes thus far:
– Implementing a madvise ioctl interface for the Xe kernel driver. This can be used by user-space to indicate preferred location for Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) ranges and similar.
– The Xe driver now handles firmware-reported hardware errors and can notify user-space using the device wedged event.
– PCI Express link states and G-states are now exposed via DebugFS.
– SR-IOV support to restore Compression Control Surface (CCS) for Xe2 and newer GPUs.
– Enabling SR-IOV support PF mode by default on supported platforms without needing to have built the Linux kernel with the CONFIG_DRM_XE_DEBUG option. This also includes enabling SR-IOV on the Xe driver when opting to use this modern driver with Tigerlake, Alder Lake, and Arctic Sound graphics rather than using the default i915 driver.
– More hardware workarounds and tuning for Xe2 and upcoming Xe graphics.
– Preparing the driver to expose MMIO regions to user-space in a future Linux kernel version.
– Support for VF migration.
– Beginning to make fixes to the Xe driver for better non-x86 support / allowing different kernel page sizes besides 4K.
– Adding PSMI support to help with hardware validation and early hardware bring-up of future Intel graphics. The Intel PSMI mode allows for capturing data from the GPU that is useful during early hardware validation and bring-up. This information is provided by the GuC micro-controller and will now be conveyed through the Xe driver for developers.
More details on this initial batch of Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes targeting Linux 6.18 can be found via this pull request.
