The Current State Of Intel Discrete Graphics On Linux: Almost "Fully Functional"

Along with bringing up DG2/Alchemist graphics card support on Linux, Intel engineers have been working to square away their support for the DG1 developer graphics card. This week thanks to XDC2021 is a fresh status update about what is working with this initial Intel graphics card on their open-source driver and what remains in the works.

Thomas Hellstrom of Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver team presented an update on their work transitioning to using TTM for memory management on their discrete graphics cards after long being focused on just supporting GEM when they exclusively had integrated graphics to support. That TTM conversion for better supporting their graphics cards with discrete video memory continues progressing well with various portions of the code already upstream.

For end-users, most interesting from the TTM presentation is about the current state overall of DG1 graphics on Linux. With the latest "drm-tip" state, the DG1 graphics are considered by Intel to be "fully functional" except suspend/resume code still under review. Hellstrom did show off though that with the pending code, suspend and resume on Linux with the DG1 is beginning to work:

On the user-space side though with the DG1 code currently within Mesa, desktop and games are working but having "occasional crashes" and there are also known XWayland rendering problems. Hopefully these remaining items will get worked out in the next few months ahead of Intel launching their Intel ARC "Alchenist" graphics cards next year.