Intel Xe Developers Begin Looking At Cross-Device & Cross-Driver HMM

The Intel open-source engineers working on the modern Xe DRM kernel graphics driver have begun looking at Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) support for cross-device and cross-driver scenarios as the latest exciting feature work for this still-experimental driver.

As part of their broader Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) work for the Xe kernel driver, Intel developers are going to begin looking at HMM cross-device and even cross-driver support for memory sharing between multiple GPUs or even other types of devices supporting Linux's HMM.

Right now though the Intel driver engineers are at the early stages of development for this HMM cross-device/cross-driver support for their Xe effort. It's been raised today though as they are soliciting feedback from the broader open-source upstream Direct Rendering Manager development community whether there is interest/use in making some of their infrastructure more common so that it can be reused by other HMM-based drivers.

They are soliciting feedback via this mailing list thread as they plot their plans moving forward whether to begin with a Xe-only driver solution or spearhead a common effort that can be jointly used by other drivers. In any event exciting times ahead as the Xe driver developers begin working more on notable feature work for this driver that is aiming to be stable in time for Lunar Lake Xe2 graphics.