Intel Sends In Their Last Batch Of Graphics Driver Feature Updates For Linux 5.1

As anticipated with the DRM-Next feature cutoff upon us for the next kernel cycle, Intel's open-source developers today sent out their last planned set of feature changes slated for the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle.

In preparation for the Linux 5.1 kernel cycle that will officially get underway when Linux 5.0 debuts around the end of February, Intel has already queued a lot of new material into the DRM-Next staging area. That earlier work most notably includes enabling Fastboot graphics by default for newer generations of graphics hardware for enhancing the boot experience. That Fastboot support by default is for Skylake and newer as well as various Atom SoCs. Also notable is Coffeelake GVT support for graphics virtualization. And the pull requests to DRM-Next over recent weeks have also included various Icelake fixes and other low-level improvements and code clean-ups.

With today's final batch of material for Linux 5.1, it's notable in that it includes the new user-space API for some Icelake features with their new VA-API media driver. This pull request also includes various work on activity tracking, execbuf and preemption improvements, Icelake watermark fixes, DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) fixes, and an initial work around fully atomic gamma mode support.

This latest batch of Intel graphics/display code feature patches can be found via this pull request.

The Linux 5.1 kernel cycle will kick off in either very late February or early March and then should culminate with the Linux 5.1.0 stable release around May.