Intel's Graphics Driver For Linux 4.1 Will Have More XenGT vGPU Support

While the first release candidate of the Linux 4.0 kernel is barely one week old, Intel's open-source graphics driver development team already has changes queued up for the next kernel cycle, Linux 4.1

Intel's DRM driver maintainer, Daniel Vetter, sent in his first drm-intel-next pull request to David Airlie for merging into the DRM-Next tree where it will bake and be tested in the weeks ahead prior to making it into the mainline kernel once Linux 4.0 has been released and the Linux 4.1 merge window opens.

Among the work as part of this first pull request is more migration on the atomic front, refactoring various code in this driver, PPGTT prep patches for dynamic page-table allocation, frame-buffer modifier support, workaround patches for Intel's next-generation Skylake, and various other work.

Perhaps most visible to end users with this first Linux 4.1 Intel i915 DRM pull is the vGPU support for client-side XenGT. This is the client-side support for Intel's technology of exposing the Intel GPU for graphics and compute to virtualized guests via mediated passthrough of the Intel HD/Iris Graphics. Intel's team has been working a lot on Xen, but KVM is to be supported too.

There's also a lot of bug fixing as usual plus other changes with this pull request. More Intel DRM pull requests for targeting the Linux 4.1 kernel will surely come in the weeks ahead. The full listing of changes with this first pull can be found via this mailing list post.