Intel DG1 Graphics Card Bring-Up On Linux Continues - Latest Bits For Local Memory
Among the recent Intel DG1 patches for Linux recently have been on the media driver front, compute runtime with OpenCL and Level Zero and as part of that the IGC support, and then most importantly the necessary Linux kernel changes building off the existing Gen12/Xe graphics support.
The initial DG1 kernel support will likely land in Linux 5.9 but some bits are still pending. In particular, this week saw sixty patches sent out for the LMEM enabling. This is for supporting the "local memory" (discrete vRAM) on the DG1 graphics card where as with the patches up to now have always been allocating from the system memory. Obviously making use of the device local memory is very important for performance purposes but getting all of these LMEM bits squared away is a bit of a challenge as up to now the Intel graphics driver stack has only been having to worry about system memory or eDRAM but never device local memory on a PCIe device.
The LMEM patches are still up in the air as they are working to adapt them to use the DMA reservation interfaces and ensuring their user-space API is in good shape around the GEM memory management interfaces. At this stage it's quite possible the LMEM patches and other DG1 bits might not be squared away until at least Linux 5.10 later in the year as the cutoff for DRM-Next to Linux 5.9 is fast approaching. In any case, it's great continuing to see Intel working punctually still on new Linux hardware support. At the end of the day, DG1 is still targeted as a vehicle for developers in beginning to target the new Xe Graphics architecture so the lack of timely mainline support won't be too much of a big deal assuming everything gets tidied up ahead of the eventual consumer Intel graphics card launch expected in the next year.
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