Intel Begins Readying Kernel Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 6.8

Intel Linux kernel graphics driver developers this week sent out their first batch of drm-intel-next i915 DRM driver changes to DRM-Next of new material to be introduced in the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle.

This is the first of several batches of i915 Direct Rendering Manager driver changes over the next few weeks to queue in DRM-Next until the Linux 6.8 merge window gets underway around the start of the new year. It will also be interesting to see if the new Intel Xe DRM driver at least experimentally is introduced for Linux 6.8 or if it will continue to bake out-of-tree longer for that modern kernel graphics driver for Intel Gen12 graphics and newer.

With this initial set of i915 patches for Linux 6.8 comes big improvements to the DisplayPort Multi-Stream Transport (DP MST) handling for better bandwidth management and Display Stream Compression (DSC). Improving the DP MST handling is most significant of this early pull while there is also support added for DisplayPort Panel Replay functionality. DP Panel Replay is a power-savings feature with the DisplayPort 2.0 spec.

Linux 6.7 declared Intel Meteor Lake graphics stable while more Meteor Lake "MTL" code is trickling in for Linux 6.8. There is DP DSC fractional BPP support and other Meteor Lake bits coming with Linux 6.8.

Another new feature with this set of i915 changes is audio fastset support. Audio fastset for the Intel driver is to eliminate the need for a full mode-set on audio changes.

The pull request also has many smaller code changes and more than one dozen bug fixes. There's also continued work on Lunar Lake "LNL" graphics enablement as part of these changes.