Trying Out Meteor Lake's Arc Graphics With The New Intel Xe Driver Was A Bust

With Linux 6.8 set to introduce the new Intel Xe experimental kernel graphics driver early next year, last week I ran some Xe vs. i915 driver benchmarks on various Intel Arc Graphics discrete GPUs. There's still room for bettering the performance but a nice initial entry into the kernel and easy to test out. For some Christmas weekend benchmarking I was curious to see how well the Xe kernel driver would work on the integrated graphics side with the new Meteor Lake processors.

Like with the Arc Graphics discrete benchmarks last week between the experimental Xe driver and mature i915 DRM driver, I ran some benchmarks on Ubuntu 23.10 while building a DRM-Next kernel of the code set for Linux 6.8. This was done in conjunction with the Mesa 24.0-devel code this week from the Oibaf PPA and also using the latest Intel graphics firmware from linux-firmware.git. As noted in Friday's article, switching to the Xe kernel driver can be done via the "i915.force_probe=![ID]" and "xe.force_probe=[ID]" parameters for the graphics PCI device ID.

Unfortunately for the new Acer Swift Go 14 with Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, the Meteor Lake integrated Arc Graphics weren't playing nicely with the experimental Xe driver:

The i915 driver worked fine while switching to the experimental Xe driver with Meteor Lake graphics yielded a white screen. If looking hard enough, the cursor is faintly visible.

Switching to a VT was still white but at least the text was a little bit visible as I hadn't installed an OpenSSH server on this laptop prior to trying out the Xe driver...

So sadly this Xe driver experience with the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H didn't pan out for the Intel DRM-Next state right now ahead of Linux 6.8. Again though the Xe driver is not used by default with any existing hardware and is still in a very active state of development. It was a bust as I was looking forward to benchmarking Xe with Meteor Lake for some fun Christmas benchmarking given how well Meteor Lake Arc Graphics have been running great with the mature i915 driver but alas I'll need to revisit this testing down the line in 2024 to see how Xe evolves. Onto other end-of-year benchmarking...