Intel Vulkan Driver Implements A Transfer Queue For DG2/Alchemist GPUs

In addition to Vulkan sparse support that works with the existing i915 kernel driver, another exciting open-source Intel Vulkan driver development this week is landing a transfer queue implementation for DG2/Alchemist GPUs. This in turn can help with hybrid graphics systems and other situations.

Longtime open-source Intel Linux graphics developer Kenneth Graunke added this transfer queue support for DG2/Alchemist GPUs. He explained in the merge request:

"XeHP's blitter commands are sufficient to implement a full transfer queue. This should be useful for hybrid graphics copies, and also for allowing apps to upload texture data asynchronously in the background."

Ken went on to add in one of the patch comments on it being just for DG2/Alchemist, "Alchemist has an improved blitter that's sufficiently powerful to implement a transfer queue. Tigerlake's blitter lacks compression handling and other features we need, unfortunately."

This merge request was open for a year before being merged this week for Mesa 23.3. No performance numbers were provided as part of the merge request but this transfer queue support should be useful for a number of scenarios.