Intel’s open-source graphics driver engineers are ending out 2025 with a bang. Sent out today was the final drm-xe-next pull request of the year of new feature material ready for the next version of the Linux kernel. Today’s pull adds support for SR-IOV scheduler groups as well as multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support.
The DRM-Xe-Next pull request is on its way to DRM-Next as code to queue in advance of the next kernel cycle, which will be known as either Linux 6.20 or more than likely Linux 7.0. This next kernel has added importance as it’s expected to be the default kernel of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.
With this updated Xe driver code the next version of the Linux kernel will support multi-device SVM for Shared Virtual Memory across Intel graphics cards. This is important for multi-device AI and GPU compute workloads with Level Zero or OpenCL. Over the past year Intel Xe SVM support got into shape and now multi-device support is working too as important for their Project Battlematrix initiative with multiple Arc Pro B-Series cards or the upcoming Crescent Island AI inference accelerator cards.
The other prominent feature of this pull request is SR-IOV scheduler groups. The prior patch series for Intel’s SR-IOV scheduler groups describes it as:
“The normal SRIOV setup timeslices the whole GT across VFs. While this is fine in the great majority of cases, in some cases the admin knows that a VF is not going to use all the GT HW and that some engines are going to be permanently idle.
To increase HW utilization in such a scenario, starting from v70.53.0 the GuC supports scheduler groups (a.k.a. Engine Group Scheduling or EGS); this feature allows the driver to subdivide a GT into groups of engines, which the GuC will then independently timeslice across VFs, thus allowing multiple VF to access the HW at the same time. Given that each group is independently scheduled, execution quantums and preemption timeouts are settable per-group-per-VF. Note that while the GuC supports the feature from v70.53.0, some fixes for it were merged in v70.55.1, so we require the latter version in the driver.”
The drm-xe-next pull request also now configures the migration queue as low-latency, SoC remapper support for the system controller, resizable BAR “ReBAR” updates, and other small changes.
With now hitting the end of 2025 with Project Battlematrix, an interesting time to bring up their software roadmap back from Computex:
With the upstream kernel state, they largely have arrived on their goals. The vLLM optimizations remain ongoing and the SR-IOV improvements continue to come about as are lingering performance optimizations as a never-ending battle. With multi-device SVM and more SR-IOV work coming for Linux 6.20~7.0, it looks like that functionality could be in good shape for that next kernel version. Granted, that aligns for a stable kernel release around April but at least should make it into Ubuntu 26.04 LTS for delivering a nice Intel graphics experience.
