Intel Xe Driver Adding "RPa" Frequency Reporting With Linux 6.14

This week Intel engineers sent out a number of kernel graphics driver pull requests of new code for the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle. In addition to the UHBR for Panther Lake and lower Alchemist GPU power use with whitelisted GPUs and fixing old Intel Haswell era graphics platforms, on Friday another (smaller) pull request was sent in for the modern Xe kernel driver.

Friday's drm-xe-next pull request were just a few extra patches for squeezing into the upcoming Linux 6.14 kernel merge window. Most notable is introducing RPa frequency information for the Xe kernel driver to report to user-space.

The "RPa" frequency is the actual achievable frequency of a given graphics processor. The RPa is defined by the PCODE at run-time based on a variety of current hardware/system conditions. Beginning in Linux 6.14, the Intel Xe DRM driver will begin exposing the RPa frequency via the "rpa_freq" file under sysfs.

The rpa_freq is the maximum achievable one compared to the rp0_freq that is the maximum hardware frequency but not necessarily achievable with current system conditions or rpe_freq as the maximum efficient frequency.

The small set of additional Intel Xe driver patches now on their way for queuing ahead of the Linux 6.14 merge window can be found via this Friday pull request.