Intel's Game Plan For Getting The Xe Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Upstreamed

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel's Game Plan For Getting The Xe Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Upstreamed

For more than one year Intel's been working on developing the Xe Linux kernel graphics driver as a modern Direct Rendering Manager driver for Gen12 and newer integrated/discrete graphics. For recent hardware this is to replace the existing i915 kernel driver usage. The Intel open-source developers continue working toward the milestone of being able to submit this driver for mainlining in the upstream Linux kernel...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Xe-Merge-Plan-April

[blackiwid]

Intel xe was released 2,5 years ago, what took them so long? I fancy the Intel Arc graphic cards hardware, but in maybe 6 months when I have to upgrade I have to go with amd because of the linux support.

[patrick1946]

Oh, yes, software is written by magic. Maybe you have seen too many Marvel movies. 😁

[schmidtbag]

I feel like now is as good of a time for Intel to split their drivers, one for i915, the other for Xe. It's nice because there is a distinct cutoff in terms of product naming scheme, architecture, and target markets. By lumping all this into a single driver, I worry this could just complicate development (and therefore slow it down) or potentially cause regressions in pre-Xe products.

[skeevy420]

Oh, yes, software is written by magic. Maybe you have seen too many Marvel movies. 😁

No, you're thinking of CSI.

I need 5 minutes to write a program to brute force 4086bit asymmetrical encryption in under 30 seconds. Oh Snap, we're being hacked. I need a 2nd set of hands on the keyboard so we can hack back at twice the speed.

When you're done we need you to enhance a grainy JPEG of a security camera feed I took with a 2007 Motorola RAZR to 4000%. I need the license plate numbers off a car a quarter mile away.

[Leinad]

Intel xe was released 2,5 years ago, what took them so long? I fancy the Intel Arc graphic cards hardware, but in maybe 6 months when I have to upgrade I have to go with amd because of the linux support.

Just use i915 for Xe

[pWe00Iri3e7Z9lHOX2Qx]

Intel xe was released 2,5 years ago, what took them so long? I fancy the Intel Arc graphic cards hardware, but in maybe 6 months when I have to upgrade I have to go with amd because of the linux support.

I'm not really sure what you are saying. Xe is supported right now by the i915 driver and has been since it was released. Their plan sounds pretty reasonable to me. All existing hardware will always be supported by i915. Optionally users can switch to the Xe driver. At some point, new hardware will default to the Xe driver and likely no effort will be made to enable it in i915.

[q66_]

I'm not really sure what you are saying. Xe is supported right now by the i915 driver and has been since it was released. Their plan sounds pretty reasonable to me. All existing hardware will always be supported by i915. Optionally users can switch to the Xe driver. At some point, new hardware will default to the Xe driver and likely no effort will be made to enable it in i915.

well, in my case i need the dedicated GPUs to work on non-x86 hardware, so i915 is jut not an option, but the new kernel driver will be; i tried porting i915 at one point and got partway through, but after the new driver was announced it just makes the effort pointless - but the driver really needs to be mainlined first

[hwertz]

Intel xe was released 2,5 years ago, what took them so long? I fancy the Intel Arc graphic cards hardware, but in maybe 6 months when I have to upgrade I have to go with amd because of the linux support.

Nothing took them so long, it presently uses the i915 drm driver to good effect, I have the Tigerlake Core i3-1115G4 (lowest-end CPU, dual core which shows as 4 cores due to hyperthreading, and GT2 GPU -- the one with least shaders etc.) It's surprisingly effective, most games easily run on high settings, more demanding ones usually medium. Cyberpunk 2077 even "walks" on it (can't call it "running" when it's 20FPS on low and "ultra performance" FSR), but it simply expects more CPU and GPU power, not much a driver can do about that.

So, in case you wondered what all this stuff was about GPU virtual address mapping and VM_BIND... (you probably didn't, but...). Currently with wine/vkd3d (or proton), the Intel devices show Direct3D12 FL11.1 (versus Direct3D12 FL12.0 on, for instance, the Nvidia GTX1650 in my desktop), due to missing Vulkan extension or two -- the missing 1 or 2 extensions require "sparse residency" support in the driver (I think this is like scatter-gather support but for video memory?), and this requires the VM_BIND support mentioned in the article. The link below discusses this, plus last comment mentions the VM_BIND patches for i915 were just rejected (which is probably why a new Intel Xe DRM is being put in.)
(Edit: Amusingly enough, the reason I recalled this was simply because I finally had my first game fail to start on the notebook due to missing FL12.0 support just within the last 3 or 4 days, and when I went to google what to potentially do about it read about the VM_BIND support and such.)

https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/5003

[Azrael]

I was hoping for the Xe driver soon but I guess I will have to wait. I am running the A770 but it generally kinda works for native games and simple ones, I haven't tried anything really new though. Would be awesome to see the Xe driver soon though.