Intel Battlemage Battles More Linux 6.12 Kernel Graphics Driver Changes

Following the pull request from earlier this week that enables Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics by default for Linux 6.12, a final set of feature updates for the Intel kernel graphics driver have been submitted ahead of this next kernel cycle.

The last feature pull request for the Intel DRM driver changes have been submitted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 6.12 merge window opening up in September. This pull has the change that's already been picked up for Linux 6.11 of requiring newer Intel GSC firmware for Arrow Lake graphics. Besides that change, the pull request has a bit more work on Battlemage.

We are eagerly awaiting Intel's next-gen discrete graphics cards built atop Xe2 and the successor to the DG2/Alchemist family. With this last feature pull for Linux 6.12 of Intel i915/Xe DRM driver material is yet more Battlemage work:

"Xe core changes for BMG. BMG requires, by design, 64k memory size alignment for scanout buffers using compression and 4-tile. So, we are adding a protection here to block framebuffers that are not aligned with that and that requires patches in both i915-display and xe core. Without this protection, we get some screen corruptions. So we need to propagate this along with the force_probe removal that Lucas sent yesterday with drm-xe-next pull request."

That's about it with this pull request. It's looking like Linux 6.12 is the nice baseline for Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics. We'll see though what more optimizations and new features still land post-6.12.