Intel Will Submit New Xe Kernel Graphics Driver Soon - Likely For Linux 6.8

It looks like Intel will soon be submitting their first Xe Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) driver pull request to DRM-Next for mainlining this modern, current and future hardware focused kernel graphics driver to be added to the mainline Linux kernel. It looks like this mainlining is set to still happen in time for the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle.

Sent out today was a drm-intel-next pull request with various changes to their existing i915 DRM kernel driver. This pull request provides display debug message improvements, DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) fixes, Panel Self Refresh (PSR) laptop display fixes, fixing tiled plane stride for Alder Lake and newer, and other low-level fixes... But today's pull request was prefaced with this message:

"Here goes another pull-request towards 6.8. We are likely going to send another one in 2 weeks, but I'd like to get this in right now so we can get a clean drm-xe-next on top of drm-next for our first Xe pull request."

At long last!!! The Intel Xe kernel graphics driver for Linux has been in development the past few years as a driver focused on supporting Tigerlake "Gen12" integrated graphics and newer along with Intel's discrete graphics hardware. The Xe driver is focused just on the needs of modern hardware and in being a "clean sheet" design is able to make use of newer DRM kernel features without breaking backwards compatibility or regressing older support, better supporting this driver on non-x86 hardware for allowing Intel discrete GPUs to work better on the likes of RISC-V / AArch64 / POWER, and ideally being more performant due to the clean and modern design catering to Intel's latest graphics hardware.

When the Intel Xe DRM driver is submitted for mainline, it's expected that for all existing hardware it will be disabled by default with continuing to prefer the mature i915 kernel driver. But with the driver going mainline it will make it much easier for interested users to test out and enjoy the new features and performance. The Intel Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers within Mesa go unchanged and in the recent Mesa Git activity more code has been landing for supporting the Xe kernel driver interfaces.

So with some luck in the next few weeks we'll see the very first Xe DRM kernel driver submission and barring any last minute changes or issues coming about it looks like that it could be mainlined for the Linux 6.8 cycle. Once the driver is indeed mainlined, I'll certainly be running some i915 vs. Xe kernel driver benchmarks on Phoronix.