Plans Being Drafted To Upstream Intel's New "Xe" Linux Graphics Driver

[hwertz]

Just to note, the 11th gen CPUs (Tigerlake) explicitly have a 12th-gen GPU on them. At least I hope the driver supports them, since I have a Tigerlake in my current notebook.

One thing not addressed, WHY are they doing a seperate Xe driver? I can tell you. The current i915 kernel driver, Gallium driver, and Vulkan driver are quite performant and feature-complete, EXCEPT they are missing a few Vulkan extensions needed for Proton or Wine+VKD3D to provide full DX12 support. "Bindless textures", in general operating modes where games can freely remap bits of video card memory (well GPU shared memory I guess for integrated GPUs) into the game's address space. i915 driver doesn't support this. My understanding is pre-Xe hardware physically can't support this mode of operation (various functionality assumes the textures, shaders, etc. are laid out in memory in a certain order, not scattered around in RAM as the game sees fit). That makes it totally sensible to clone the existing i915 driver, and do the full rewrite Xe needs to support the more flexible usage it supports while stripping out a bunch of old kruft. (The other choice, patching into i915, would have meant a slower pace of development since one would have to be careful to maintain current behavior for older GPUs; and you'd end up with so many places with "Xe" and "pre-Xe" codepaths, you'd almost have 2 drivers in one anyway.)

[Ruckizucki]

Well, yeah, if you want to be pedantic about it, Xorg is not technically "abandoned", since it is still seeing some maintenance. Obsolete, yeah that applies whether it gets bugfixes and minor patches or not.

The producer of a thing does not define it's obsoletism. The user does. Mayne people still are using Windows XP/7. And most of them are doing it, because they don't see any of teh later versions of a worthy replacement that actually would make XP obsolete.

[Ruckizucki]

I have read the Intel XE driver being made for (which would make sense) any CPU with Intel XE IGP (which would from 11th gen on) or for 12th gen. hardware ... so which one is right?

[mangeek]

My dream is Intel Xe graphics on a Intel-designed ARM or RISC-V CPU.

This is one of my big hopes for the SiFive/Intel partnership. Having a solid GPU and graphics software is key to adoption, and it would be a shame for a new hardware platform to need years of hacking (like the VideoCore or Apple Silicon GPU) before hobbyists could put it to use.

[rogerx]

Well, yeah, if you want to be pedantic about it, Xorg is not technically "abandoned", since it is still seeing some maintenance. Obsolete, yeah that applies whether it gets bugfixes and minor patches or not.

https://www.parkersoftware.com/blog/...'t%20addressed.
What are obsolete software versions?
An outdated software program is one that's no longer supported by the vendor. This means that any new-found bugs in the program aren't addressed.

See obsolete thesaurus.

Vendors, whether X/Xorg themselves or Linux distributions, still support X/Xorg.

Even antique does not fit X/Xorg, as X/Xorg is relatively well utilized by many Linux distributions.

Per my thoughts or according to my reality, Systemd is already obsolete and deprecated, will never reach maintenance mode. (Eh, Systemd seems to mock my computers here, "Just try to maintain me and then just watch what happens!") Guess if I did only use a systemd O/S, such as Fedora or Ubuntu, then I would too would likely start thinking X/Xorg were obsolete.

It would be really funny, if in twenty or more years, we're still all running X/Xorg.

[rogerx]

Weird that the 11th gen Intel missed out? Those chips have Xe graphics etc

Although I have not looked-up specifically 11th gen Intel CPU, cannot remember if I have the 11th gen laptop here, I have made mention before regarding Phoenix's articles apparently improperly referencing the CPU generations in regards to this Xe driver upgrade, and should instead properly reference the GPU generations names.

If you look-up either the Wikipedia or Intel's data specifically, think they make mention of the GPU generation with regards to the Xe driver upgrade.

Bottom line, anything with Xe hardware is likely applicable. ... just don't hold me to the stake on this one, as somebody might decide the bus lacks required features. However, pretty sure 11th CPU generation is very very recent.

[gfunk]

Weird that the 11th gen Intel missed out? Those chips have Xe graphics etc

[TemplarGR]

right... appears "maintenance mode" is probably a better terminology than abandoned or obsolete.

... wondering if systemd will skip maintenance mode all together, and head straight for being abandoned/obsolete... ;-)

Well, yeah, if you want to be pedantic about it, Xorg is not technically "abandoned", since it is still seeing some maintenance. Obsolete, yeah that applies whether it gets bugfixes and minor patches or not.

[rogerx]

Since when Wikipedia is the one source for everything? Everyone knows Xorg has ceased getting serious development and is in maintenance mode....

right... appears "maintenance mode" is probably a better terminology than abandoned or obsolete.

... wondering if systemd will skip maintenance mode all together, and head straight for being abandoned/obsolete... ;-)

[Vermilion]

It does, but it seems to be more about what's outside of the kernel than inside. Seems like the kernel drivers expose several interfaces that could end up being used to accomplish 'picture on a screen'. Are there opportunities to make a kernel driver smaller/simpler if it only exposes a DRI path? Can other interfaces be piped through DRI (thinking of the console, DDX, etc.)?

IIUC that's how thing are done today. Most of the explanation in that blog post (until DRI) is about historical stuff to explain how we got there.
Nowadays, instead of running X as root or having DDX drivers, we run X rootless and it includes the generic modesetting driver which leverages DRM/KMS.
For the sake of comparison, Wayland does away with userspace drivers, and everything is run through DRM/KMS.