Trying Intel Kabylake Graphics With DRM-Next For Linux 4.13

After testing out AMDGPU's DRM-Next code for Linux 4.13, I moved on to seeing if there are any Kabylake graphics performance differences slated for the upcoming Linux 4.13 kernel cycle.

Intel's changes for their Direct Rendering Manager in Linux 4.13 include user-space ABI alterations, initial Cannonlake hardware support, GVT graphics improvements, and more as well as other tuning. Initial Cannonlake support is perhaps the most user evident change for Intel DRM in Linux 4.13 with no explicit mentions of changes that would improve (or otherwise affect) the Intel OpenGL/Vulkan performance.

With the Core i7 7700K featuring Kabylake GT2 (HD Graphics 630), I ran some benchmarks of Linux 4.12 Git versus DRM-Next for the material queued for Linux 4.13. Mesa 17.2-dev via the Padoka PPA meanwhile was running on this Ubuntu 17.04 system. No other changes were made during the testing process.








While there are code improvements and underlying work on the Intel DRM driver in DRM-Next for Linux 4.13, nothing appeared to affect the OpenGL/Vulkan performance one way or another in our common tests with this i7-7700K Kabylake system. All the test details in full via this result file. At least no regressions were encountered either.