Intel Posts Early Linux Enablement Patches For Ponte Vecchio

When it comes to Intel's "i915" DRM kernel driver much of the work lately by the company's open-source engineers have been focused on DG2/Alchemist for Arc Graphics products. There has been some occasional DRM kernel driver patches mentioning their HPC work and Ponte Vecchio "PVC" preparations while sent out today was the first set of patches actually introducing Ponte Vecchio to this kernel driver.

For months already within Intel's Compute-Runtime stack for OpenCL / oneAPI Level Zero we've been seeing early Ponte Vecchio "PVC" references but not much within their Linux kernel driver until now.

Sent out a short time ago was the patches to introduce Ponte Vecchio, "Ponte Vecchio (PVC) is a new GPU based on the Xe_HPC architecture. As a compute-focused platform, PVC has compute engines and enhanced copy engines, but no render engine (there is no geometry pipeline) and no display. This is just a handful of early enablement patches, including some initial support for the new copy engines (although we're not yet adding those to the platform's engine list or exposing them to userspace just yet)."

With much of DG2/Alchemist enablement getting squared away for around Linux 5.19, expect the focus to shift soon to more Ponte Vecchio enablement on the Intel HPC side.

The initial set of 11 patches for PVC is just about 400 lines of new code in making use of some existing Xe (HPC) code paths already, etc. Additional blitter and media engines for Ponte Vecchio will also be exposed at a later time.