Intel's Linux Graphics Driver Continues With Multi-Tile Preparations

In addition to Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver developers being quite busy preparing for upcoming Intel Arc "Alchemist" (DG2) graphics cards on the consumer side, they have concurrently been preparing for Xe HP "Ponte Vecchio" hardware too. One of the big undertakings on that side from the driver perspective is bringing up multiple tiles.

For Ponte Vecchio's multi-tile / chiplet design, Linux driver work for multi-tile support has been going on for months. The driver needs to adapt to support multiple GT instances and the multiple memory regions off a single PCI Express device.

Intel

On top of that multi-tile driver work written about in Q4, more multi-tile patches have been hitting the public mailing list this week. A second series (debuted and quickly followed up by a v2 revision with somew fixes) are additional i915 kernel graphics driver modifications for multi-tile platforms.

And we are on notice for a third patch series coming soon for further wiring up multi-tile support by Intel's kernel graphics driver. Though given the timing of these patches they won't be mainlined until v5.18 at least, so we'll see what more comes in the next few weeks/months. Intel's Linux engineers are extremely busy with both the consumer and enterprise undertakings by the company but it's great to see all of this work continuing in a punctual, transparent, and open-source manner that they have established over the years.