Intel Sends Initial Linux 5.8 Graphics Driver Updates - Adds Ability For Tapping Full EU Perf, More Tiger Lake Bits

Less than one week since the release of Linux 5.7-rc1, Intel's large open-source graphics team has already submitted their first pull request to DRM-Next of changes for Linux 5.8.

The Linux 5.8 merge window won't happen until June and then that stable release later in the summer, but already the Intel folks have a lot of material accumulating for this next cycle. Some of the highlights for this initial pull include:

- More Intel Tiger Lake PCI IDs added along with more driver workarounds for Gen12 graphics.

- A fix for supporting 5K tiled dual DisplayPort monitors on Gen9/Skylake hardware.

- New user-space interfaces for the perf subsystem to be useful in performance profiling and other analysis purposes.

- As part of the perf user-space API work is also an interface to allow benchmarking full execution unit (EU) performance rather than the current behavior of limiting to half EUs in order to allow for media playback compatibility. This affects Gen11/Icelake and beyond and there are Mesa changes pending as well around this power-gating configuration locking to avoid the half EU array power-gating while losing the media capabilities. From the pending Mesa patches, "We have a dilemma on Gen11 where a functional requirement for media forces the media driver to powergate half the EU array of the GPU. This is because the HW is designed in such a way that VME samplers are only available for half the EUs. Targeting those samplers from a subslice that does not have them risk triggering a hang. Unfortunately this doesn't play well with the performance monitoring HW needing a stable power configuration. So the initial performance support in i915 powergates half the EU for all contexts when using the performance monitoring HW (only configuration that works for all contexts). But this makes performance analysis somewhat pointless for 3D workloads."

- A fix for broken audio after resuming from S3 suspend on Jasper Lake.

- A display fix for the Apple 15-inch 2017 MacBook Pro.

- Audio fixes for Gen9+.

- Various power management improvements.

- Various other fixes and optimizations.

The full list of changes can be found via this pull request. Expect more Intel DRM graphics driver changes for Linux 5.8 to accumulate over the weeks ahead.