Intel's Vulkan Driver Begins Making Infrastructure Changes For Multi-GPU Support

For months we have seen various Intel open-source Linux graphics driver patches that begin preparing for multi-GPU support where in moving forward with their Xe graphics cards there could be the iGPU + dGPU setup or even multiple Xe graphics cards in a single system. So far those Intel Linux multi-GPU preparations have been focused on their kernel-space driver while now it's reaching into user-space with their Vulkan driver seeing early infrastructure changes.

The Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver has begun seeing prep work for enabling a multi-GPU future with multiple Intel graphics processors on the same system. Up to now, the Intel ANV driver has made design assumptions of just having one Intel GPU but now that is being reworked.

The patches merged a few minutes ago begin allowing for multiple adapters and enumerating multiple devices in acknowledging, "What we have now works today because we our GPUs are build into the CPU and so you're guaranteed to only ever have one of them. One day, that will change and we want ANV to be ready."

Beyond the existing Gen12 graphics code that initially came together in 2019, there isn't any new Xe/Gen12 specific code to talk about today but rather these necessary infrastructure changes to make for what is sure to be a very exciting 2020.