Intel Revises The Shared Virtual Memory Support For Their Linux Graphics Driver

In their journey towards the Intel Xe GPUs expected to launch initially next year in the form of Ponte Vecchio, just about one month ago Intel posted patches implementing Shared Virtual Memory support for their Linux graphics driver. Those SVM patches have now been revised for further review in potentially making it for Linux 5.6 should everything look good.

Shared Virtual Memory support allows a single address space to handle threads operating on both CPU backed and GPU discrete memory. SVM is important for OpenCL, oneAPI, and other modern pointer-based programming models. Intel's SVM support is built atop the Linux kernel's Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) infrastructure.

The 13 patches in their revised form updates its usage of the HMM API and addresses various items raised during the previous round of code review. Various fixes also were incorporated. The Intel "i915" Linux graphics driver supports both SVM system and run-time allocator support with this code.

We'll see how round two of the Intel SVM review goes to see if it stands chances of merging to DRM-Next in the weeks ahead for Linux 5.6 early next year or could be dragged out to another kernel release cycle.