Frame-Buffer Compression Support For Vintage Intel i865 Graphics Revived

Back in April I wrote about patches for enabling FBC on the Intel 865 chipset nearly two decades after that chipset first shipped. Those patches didn't yet hit the mainline Linux kernel but they were revived again this week.

These patches are for enabling frame-buffer compression support on the Intel Extreme 2 Graphics found with the i865 "Springdale" chipset. Frame-buffer compression can yield performance and power efficiency advantages thanks to the reduced bandwidth. Newer generations of Intel graphics hardware have squared away their FBC support for a while but the i865 era support was overlooked until recent patches improving the state pushed it forward enough where it could finally be enabled by default.

These FBC fixes amounting to just about 50 lines of new code allow for enabling frame-buffer compression on i865 and i85x series chipsets.

It's possible we could see this FBC support merged for Linux 5.9. But if you are still rocking i865 era hardware in 2020, you may want to consider upgrading for far better performance and power efficiency on anything more recent.