Intel Xe Kernel GPU Driver Starts Landing SR-IOV Bits & Other Features For Linux 6.9

Upstreamed for Linux 6.8 is the experimental Xe kernel graphics driver that is a modern replacement to the "i915" Direct Rendering Manager driver. The Xe kernel driver targets Tigerlake graphics and newer while it won't be until Lunar Lake / Xe2 when it aims to become the default driver for Intel iGPU/dGPU graphics. For the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel merge window are more feature changes and fixes to this new open-source Intel kernel graphics driver.

This week the main pull request of drm-xe-next changes was submitted and subsequently merged to DRM-Next. This first feature pull since the Xe upstreaming includes a number of fixes found from the more widespread testing on Linux 6.8. While the Xe driver isn't the default for current Intel integrated or discrete graphics, when building it on Linux 6.8+ it can be easily enabled via the i915.force_probe / xe.force_probe module options.

Among the Intel Xe driver changes coming for Linux 6.9 include new user-space APIs for querying the GuC firmware submission version and adding a vRAM frequency sysfs attribute. The Xe driver is also dropping workarounds exclusive to existing Intel pre-production hardware, starts plumbing SR-IOV support, logging improvements, additional workarounds for Meteor Lake graphics, additional workarounds for Lunar Lake / Xe2 graphics, fixing remaining x86 32-bit build issues, GuC firmware loading support for Lunar Lake, and many fixes and other low-level improvements.

See the drm-xe-next pull for the big list of Intel Xe DRM driver patches ready for Linux 6.9.