Intel Posts Revised Linux Driver Patches For DG2 Graphics, Xe_HP SDV Accelerator

Now that the DG1 graphics support is beginning to get squared away and with Linux 5.15 will likely be able to boot to an accelerated desktop, bring-up on the DG2 graphics card has begun along with the Xe_HP software development vehicle.

At the start of July were the inaugural patches for DG2 and Xe_HP SDV on Linux. DG2 makes use of newer Xe_HPG 12.55 graphics IP and with aa Xe_LPD v13 display IP block similar to Alder Lake P. Xe_HP SDV meanwhile is for Intel's next-gen accelerator with Xe_HP 12.50 IP but no display block.

Posted this morning was the second spin of the patch series which now amounts to 50 patches with nearly three thousand lines of new code over the existing open-source driver state.

This updated series has decided to drop the Display Stream Compression (DSC) related patches for now since they need further work as well as making a number of other low-level technical changes.

As noted with the patch series, "Both platforms will need additional enablement patches beyond what's present in this series before they're truly usable, including various LMEM and GuC work that's already happening separately. The new features/functionality that these platforms bring (such as multi-tile support, dedicated compute engines, etc.) may be referenced in passing in some of these patches but will be fully enabled in future series."

This preliminary Intel DG2 and Xe_HP SDV support will likely land for the Linux 5.15 kernel later this year while will likely take some months/kernels before the support is all ironed out. Even if everything looks great for 5.15, that timing puts it out of scope for appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 21.10's default kernel and thus likely more of next spring's distribution releases before we could see widespread out-of-the-box and working DG2 support. Latest Intel DG2 availability rumors/information are these gaming graphics cards have begun sampling to developers while the actual retail availability is likely still some months away.