Intel Enables Fastboot Across The Board With Their Graphics Driver In Linux 6.9

A last set of drm-intel-next feature patches were submitted this week for DRM-Next to stage ahead of the upcoming Linux 6.9 kernel merge window.

While much of Intel's focus moving forward is on the new and modern-focused Intel Xe DRM kernel driver, which as noted in that article already saw its feature patches queued for v6.9, the i915 driver continues to be maintained and this week saw a last round of updates for the next kernel version.

New features queued this week for Linux 6.9 include DisplayPort tunneling and bandwidth allocation support, additional Alder Lake N PCI IDs being added, enabling fastboot support on older platforms, a DebugFS option to enable big-joiner, various Lunar Lake changes, and other updates.

Yes, even in 2024 new Alder Lake N parts are apparently coming to market with Mesa also having seen two new IDs for ADL-N merged.

The Intel Fastboot support has been part of a long effort to improve the boot process and cutting down (or eliminating) unnecessary mode-sets during the boot process. Fastboot has been enabled by default for Skylake and newer while with Linux 6.9 Intel is enabling it across the board for older platforms.

Intel Linux engineer Ville Syrjälä explained in that patch:

"There's nothing magical about vlv+ platforms vs. fastboot. If it works somewhere it should work everywhere, assuming we've not missed any crucial state checks. That seems unlikely on older platforms with less state to check anyway.

Just enable fastboot across the board, and the remove the remnants of the optional stuff (we already removed the modparam for fastboot anyway)."

The full list of Intel DRM-Next graphics/display driver patches for the week as the final set of material for Linux 6.9 can be found via this pull request.