Intel Landing More Driver Work Needed For Discrete GPU Linux Support

Landing today in Mesa 20.1-devel were some of the OpenGL/Vulkan-side driver changes needed as part of Intel's road to bringing up discrete Xe GPU support under Linux.

For months we have been reporting on various elements of Intel's discrete GPU bring-up for Linux, which is largely on the kernel side with device local memory support, various code restructuring to make the driver less iGPU focused, multi-GPU support, and SVM support.

The patches merged today was work that's been sitting under review for the past eight months. The work is around adding device local mmap'ing support and supporting the new MMAP_OFFSET kernel ioctl in conjunction with device local memory, which is needed in the context of discrete graphics cards. The work includes core Intel Mesa changes and the relevant bits for handling the new ioctl within the OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

This is just the latest in their long-running work for getting dGPU support squared away of the anticipated Xe DG1 launch in the months ahead. The initial dGPU is based on their Gen 12 graphics architecture and it's with the in-development Linux 5.7 kernel that Gen12 on Tiger Lake is considered stable while the dGPU portion appears to still be a work in progress.