Intel Async Page-Flipping Support Revised For Benefiting Skylake Graphics And Newer

Over the past several months there has been work on Intel's Linux kernel graphics driver for async page-flipping to yield better performance. That work was revised against today for hopefully making it into a kernel release in the near future albeit too late for Linux 5.9 but regardless nice to see this work moving forward.

Asynchronous page-flipping is about being able to avoid an extra blit that occurs per-frame when flipping while full-screen applications like games are running at a resolution equal to the screen resolution. Basically if no scaling is necessary, the overhead of an extra blit per-frame can be avoided prior to page flipping, which in turn is good for full-screen gaming performance.

Async flipping is supported with Intel Skylake "Gen9" graphics and newer. These five patches coming in at just over two hundred lines of code allow for this efficiency improvement.

Hopefully we'll see this work squared away in time for Linux 5.10 later in the year.