Intel Arc Graphics Demonstrated Running On ARM With Ampere Altra

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Intel Arc Graphics Demonstrated Running On ARM With Ampere Altra

With the new Intel "Xe" Direct Rendering Manager kernel driver that's been in development one of the touted benefits of the clean sheet driver design is that it would enable using Intel discrete GPUs on non-x86 CPU architectures. The long-used "i915" DRM kernel graphics driver has many x86'isms in the code-base built up over the many years of Intel integrated graphics that were only ever found within their x86/x86_64 processors. But now in the era of Intel discrete graphics, there's been issues in trying to run Intel Arc Graphics on say ARM, POWER9, and RISC-V, among others. The experimental Intel Xe driver was recently successfully demonstrated in running on ARM using an Ampere Altra workstation...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Arc-Graphics-On-ARM

[mrg666]

Very interesting! I have not been able to use (even build) the experimental Xe driver yet. I will give it a try in 6.9 kernel again.

[Eirikr1848]

A Raptor Talos workstation DIY build with IBM POWER cores and Intel GPU/AI/compute-thingy?

Amazing. What a world.

[schmidtbag]

Very cool. This is promising considering, from what I've heard, it's been rather difficult trying to get even AMD hardware to run on ARM, so the fact Intel already can is good news, and potentially a selling point for Arc.

[superm1]

Very cool. This is promising considering, from what I've heard, it's been rather difficult trying to get even AMD hardware to run on ARM, so the fact Intel already can is good news, and potentially a selling point for Arc.

Afaik the typical problems are incomplete or non spec compliant PCI implementations on ARM.

[Quackdoc]

arc on i915 has been great, haven't tested much of XE since i've been having nothing but issues with it (does anyone have a DKMS setup so I can test git without needing to recompile kernel? realize that's kinda sketchy) but it would be nice to see temperature, clock reporting and all that jazz get wired up.

[brad0]

Very cool. This is promising considering, from what I've heard, it's been rather difficult trying to get even AMD hardware to run on ARM, so the fact Intel already can is good news, and potentially a selling point for Arc.

The problems are almost always on the ARM side with incomplete hardware implementation. Especially when the few SBCs I have seen people playing with this on are open ended 1x PCIe 3.0 slots which no one would expect anyone to want to put a GPU in; very low end network adapters and other things of that nature, sure.

[gentoofu]

Very cool. This is promising considering, from what I've heard, it's been rather difficult trying to get even AMD hardware to run on ARM, so the fact Intel already can is good news, and potentially a selling point for Arc.

AMD has had ARM support for a long time with RDNA3 added around November of 2022.

[schmidtbag]

AMD has had ARM support for a long time with RDNA3 added around November of 2022.

Right, but as you've pointed out: it took until the end of 2022 for that to come to fruition. That's a long time considering how long AMD's open-source drivers have been around, and as far as I understand, older generations aren't necessarily going to work on ARM.

[gentoofu]

Right, but as you've pointed out: it took until the end of 2022 for that to come to fruition. That's a long time considering how long AMD's open-source drivers have been around, and as far as I understand, older generations aren't necessarily going to work on ARM.

I don't understand. The link I provided mentions that it's been working fine for pre-DCN cards and DCN support was added at Nov of 2022. Earliest release of Intel Arc discrete graphics card was June 14, 2022 and it is now partially working on ARM.