Intel Preparing Resizable BAR Support For Their Arc Graphics On Linux

Ahead of the Intel Arc "Alchemist" graphics cards shipping this year, Intel's open-source developers have continued ironing out the Linux driver support. The most recent kernel patches are for getting their Resizable BAR "ReBAR" support in order.

Sent out this week were a set of patches for small BAR recovery support for the Intel kernel graphics driver on Linux.

The patch explains, "Starting from DG2 we will have resizable BAR support for device local-memory, but in some cases the final BAR size might still be smaller than the total local-memory size. In such cases only part of local-memory will be CPU accessible, while the remainder is only accessible via the GPU. This series adds the basic enablers needed to ensure that the entire local-memory range is usable."

The series is now under review and could be mainlined as soon as the v5.18 kernel. There is initial DG2/Alchemist support within the Linux kernel and Mesa drivers already but the code still seems to be very much in flux, especially when coming to performance optimizations. Assuming these graphics processors start shipping around the end of Q1, it would definitely be recommended (if not required) to be running the latest Linux and Mesa Git until the DG2 support settles down. In any case it's great Intel continues pushing this dGPU support as open-source and ahead of launch.