Power-Saving FBC For Intel Skylake Is Still Baking On Linux

While the Linux 4.6 kernel is enabling FBC and PSR by default in the Intel graphics driver, it's only for select generations of Intel hardware for these power-saving Frame-Buffer Compression and Panel Self Refresh features. With Intel Skylake, FBC support remains a work in progress.

At least today, Intel's Paulo Zanoni sent out his second version of patches for getting Frame-Buffer Compression support in order for the latest-generation Skylake hardware. He commented on the patch series, "The Kernel patches are mostly the same, but with the review suggestions implemented. The DDX patch is new and should really help things now."

The final patch in the series would enable FBC by default for Skylake hardware to avoid having to boot with the i915 FBC DRM module option (i915.enable_fbc) to enable the support. That last patch is rather ambitious too as it does enable FBC just not for Skylake but all newer hardware too, like the yet-to-be-released Kabylake (KBL) generation. The thinking is that developers will then encounter any issues sooner with being forced along that code path while still the support for post-Gen9 is considered "preliminary" by this open-source Intel Linux kernel graphics driver.

The frame-buffer compression support for Skylake is too late for making it into the Linux 4.6 merge window so the next hope for getting this power-saving feature on the newest Intel-powered laptops will be with the Linux 4.7 kernel.