More Intel Tiger Lake Fixes Heading Into Linux 5.11, eLLC Caching For Display Buffers

Another round of Intel graphics driver changes were submitted last week to DRM-Next for queuing ahead of next month's Linux 5.11 merge window.

With this latest feature pull is a "healthy chunk" of Tiger Lake related fixes. The Tiger Lake fixes are for possible hang issues, addressing the media power gate sequence, flushing engines before breadcrumbs, and other alterations.

Outside of the continuing Tiger Lake / Gen12 work there is also finally the enabling of eLLC caching for displayable buffers on Skylake/Gen9 graphics and newer. That patch has been floating around for a year and a half for eLLC caching of display buffers on the newer hardware. This does help a few benchmarks at least for the higher-end Intel graphics SKUs having the eLLC cache. Generally the performance benefit is up to a few percent but previous SynMark numbers were as much as 20% on Skylake GT4e in a best case scenario.

This latest pull request also has many other Intel graphics driver fixes as outlined via the mailing list message.

This follows their first pull request of Intel DRM changes for Linux 5.11 that brought more discrete graphics work, integer scaling support, async page flipping, and other features.

The Linux 5.11 merge window will open in mid-December while the stable kernel release should be out by the end of February.