Intel Gen 12 Graphics Bringing "Display State Buffer" Engine

Since June there has been the Intel open-source development team volleying Linux patches for bringing up Tiger Lake "Gen 12" graphics. There have been several rounds of patches working on the new Gen 12 graphics and that experimental open-source support is coming with Linux 5.4. A new patch series sheds more light on one of the new Gen 12 hardware features: the Display State Buffer engine.

The Display State Buffer (or shortened as the "DSB") is a new engine to handle batch submit display register programming. The Intel Linux driver at least will be making use of the DSB for LUT programming and yet-to-materialize patches will leverage the DSB for HDR (High Dynamic Range) meta-data programming and page-flipping related operations. The DSB hardware allows for reduced loading time and CPU activity with punting more work to this engine attached to the display controller and is said to improve the context switching performance with Gen 12 graphics.

The patches are under review. Given their timing the Display State Buffer bring-up will likely not see the mainline kernel until Linux 5.5. But with Tiger Lake being likely at least a whole calendar year out, there's plenty of time for this Linux driver enablement to settle down.