Intel's Mesa Drivers Begin Preparing For The New Xe Kernel Driver

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel's Mesa Drivers Begin Preparing For The New Xe Kernel Driver

One of the open-source Intel Linux graphics driver milestones we have to look forward to this year is the introduction of the new "Xe" kernel graphics driver to effectively succeed the existing "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver for recent generations of Intel graphics. More prep code was merged this week to Mesa's Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver in preparing to be able to make use of that new kernel mode driver once its upstreamed into the Linux kernel...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Mesa-ANV-Prep-For-Xe-KMD

[mangeek]

Intel! I know this sounds a bit bonkers, but... what if you hook XE up to ANV only, and on that path, satisfy OpenGL by default via Zink-on-ANV?

You could always go back and hook-up native OpenGL later, but doing this would set a really awesome precedent, reduce efforts, and possibly make future development of the Linux graphics stack more nimble.

I feel like you're the only mainstream desktop player that can do this because of where you are in this process and where your product currently stands in the market.

[Vermilion]

So basically Intel now have:

• A split in OpenGl drivers for Crocus/Iris at Gen8+
• A split in Vulkan drivers for Hasvk/ANV at Gen9+
• A split in Kernel drivers for i915/Xe at Gen12+

I wonder what it would take to align all these and get rid of abstractions and code interfacing with both old and new stuff. Surely someone at Intel smarter than me looked at this already.

[wooptoo]

Intel Xe kernel graphics driver will support Gen12/Xe Graphics and newer

Excited for the new graphics stack.
Does this mean that it will support my Alder Lake-S GT1 [UHD Graphics 770] ?

[mangeek]

Does this mean that it will support my Alder Lake-S GT1 [UHD Graphics 770] ?

It should. I wonder how long it'll take to get into the mainline kernel. You should already have Alderlake-S if you have kernel 5.11 and Mesa 20.3 or newer. I don't think we'll notice much difference as users, this is more about driver developers being able to move ahead with newer stuff without having to include consideration for years-EoL hardware.

Vermilion, I think that's... actually fine and it's less of a mess than it sounds; the kernel and Mesa for older stuff already work, this helps speed new developments targeting new hardware while protecting the older stuff from those changes. AFAIK, it's totally fine if these components overlap weirdly as long as defaults are set properly.

[abott]

Intel ever gonna drop documentation like AMD down the line?

I hope their IP isn't as horrid with outside features that they can't license. I'd love to poke at the hardware since I now wrapped my head around 3D math that these cards operate with. I'd love to check out this new, slimmed stack with no baggage against their docs, find their holes and issues too.

They definitely should, most of AMD's linux devs are Valve dudes because of it, and their work has actually been amazing with looking deep into odd issues the AMD devs don't seem to have time to do, focusing only on new enablement and all.

Also, I'd love to see any benchmarks vs the Windows driver on nearly, I feel I should be getting a lot more performance out of the A770. Not that Linux feels much faster, I don't game on Linux/play the same games, but I feel the Windows driver is a lot worse than Linux currently.