Initial Icelake Support Heading To Linux 4.17, Many Bug Fixes Thanks To CI Testing

Now that the Linux 4.16 merge window ended this past weekend, Intel has submitted their first pull request to DRM-Next of material they want to get in for Linux 4.17.

This initial Intel DRM-Next work for Linux 4.17 includes basic hardware enablement for Ice Lake "Gen 11" graphics although that initial work will likely take a few kernel cycles before it's ready for these 2019 processors. It was just yesterday as well that Intel submitted the initial Ice Lake patches for Mesa when it comes to the user-space OpenGL driver.

This pull request also has AUX-F port support for Cannonlake and other Cannonlake "Gen 10" graphics updates for these yet-to-be-released processors.

Other work in this drm-intel-next tree includes compressed frame-buffer support for sprites, shrinking kernel memory caches when the GPU is idle, power gating enhancements, debugging improvements, and a variety of other low-level code improvements and fixes.

What's also notable about this pull request is that all bug fixes found in this branch were first uncovered via their continuous integration (CI) testing and not by end-user submissions. Joonas Lahtinen of Intel noted in the pull request, "CI has been really effective in catching problems before users have reported them to us. All Bugzillas closed from this tag are from our CI reports!"

The Linux 4.17 development cycle will officially get underway in April once Linux 4.16.0 is out, giving plenty of time for several more Intel DRM updates to be submitted to DRM-Next. Linux 4.17 will then make it out as stable likely around the start of July.