Intel's New "Xe" Kernel Graphics Driver Submitted Ahead Of Linux 6.8

As I wrote about last week that Intel's modern Xe kernel graphics driver was nearing submission for the mainline kernel and today it's indeed been submitted to DRM-Next. The Intel Xe kernel graphics driver is the modern alternative to the long-used i915 DRM kernel driver and is fitted to support Tigerlake graphics and newer -- both integrated graphics hardware as well as discrete GPUs/accelerators.

The Intel Xe kernel graphics driver has been in development the past two years to better support modern Intel graphics hardware from integrated to discrete hardware, re-design the various driver interfaces and make other engineering improvements with this clean sheet driver design, aim to provide better cross CPU architecture compatibility so the Intel discrete graphics can work on the likes of Arm / POWER / RISC-V, and all-around taking a fresh approach at things compared to the basically two decade old i915 driver. In particular, provide better performance is a long-term goal. It was nearly one year ago to the day that the Intel Xe Linux driver was first publicly revealed and has continued to be a big engineering investment by the Intel open-source Linux software team.

A short time ago the inaugural drm-xe-next pull request was submitted ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.8 merge window:

"Here goes the first pull request for the drm/xe driver.

Our team was focused on putting together a driver that uses most, if not all, of the key drm concepts and has a functional display that is shared with i915. All the platforms are still protected by the force_probe protection because they are either officially supported by i915, or because they are still under enablement like Lunar Lake.

We still have a lot of work ahead of us, but we believe that it will be better to work with all of these cross-driver concepts after we are merged to drm-next along with the other drivers.

Besides the cross-driver collaboration and enabling of upcoming hardware, one of our key areas will be to improve performance and address reports by users so that the driver keeps getting better."

I look forward to benchmarking the Xe kernel graphics driver in the new year with Linux 6.8. As mentioned, it won't be used by default but will require the xe.force_probe= behavior to avoid all current Intel graphics hardware defaulting to the mature i915 driver support.