Intel Continues Linux Preparations For Xe HP Compute Accelerators

While Intel's DG2/Alchemist Arc graphics card support with the open-source Linux driver stack appears to be getting into shape with the latest upstream code ahead of the graphics cards expected to ship next quarter, the Xe HP compute accelerator support remains very much a work-in-progress for the open-source Intel Linux kernel driver.

Sent out on Monday were the latest set of patches for enabling these accelerators new engine class: the Compute Command Streamers (CCS). The CCS is like Intel's conventional graphics render engine but focused just on GPGPU computing and thus no 3D pipeline -- just focused on compute and video processing.

The end of February patch series prepares the CCS compute class / engine support but doesn't yet expose them. Besides this patch series now being too late to find it queued up in DRM-Next ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.18 merge window, there still is more work to be accomplished before the compute command streamers will be exposed. The patch cover letter noted, "For now we're just sending some initial "under the hood" preparation for CCS engines without actually exposing them to userspace or adding them to any platform's engine list yet. There may be a bit more GuC-related updates necessary before it's safe to expose them, so the actual [user-space ABI] bits will come later once that's all worked out."

The latest Intel Linux driver CCS patches for now can be found on the mailing list. Given the timing they won't land until at least the v5.19 kernel cycle, so that would likely be the minimum kernel version for Xe HP support assuming all of the other enablement work is wrapped up by then... That would be a mid-summer stable kernel release at the earliest if everything is wrapped up in time for the 5.19 cycle. We'll see how it all plays out timing-wise for when the Xe HP compute accelerator driver support is all ironed out and when such hardware becomes readily available,