Linux 5.13 Merges Support For Intel DG1 Graphics Platform Monitoring / Telemetry

Outside of the i915 kernel graphics driver one of the areas Linux 5.13 is seeing more discrete graphics card bring-up work is within their PMT driver for enabling platform monitoring / telemetry support with this inaugural Intel PCIe graphics card.

The Linux Multi-Function Device (MFD) subsystem pull request for the 5.13 merge window included the addition of Intel DG1 graphics support to the company's Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) driver.

Last year Intel mainlined their Platform Monitoring Technology support for Linux. As explained in the past articles on Intel PMT for Linux, "this hardware telemetry is driven by customer demand and isn't about reporting hardware data back to Intel but rather collecting data on hardware internally within organizations and making it easier to manage. PMT currently supports Telemetry, Watcher (hardware sampling/tracing), and Crashlog components for various use-cases within organizations."

PMT arrived with Intel Tiger Lake platforms on the consumer front while on the server side is coming with Sapphire Rapids. It also turns out Intel's discrete graphics hardware also supports PMT. With Linux 5.13 is the initial Intel Platform Monitoring Technology coverage for the DG1 PCI Express graphics card. The aggregator support is in place for this telemetry data and amounts to just over one hundred lines of new code for wiring things up.

The overall Intel discrete graphics / DG1 state for the Linux kernel remains a work-in-progress due to all of the i915 driver restructuring necessary for dGPUs with dedicated video memory. It's looking though that within the next kernel release or two it should be largely buttoned up... Just in time for the enabling for DG2 and other forthcoming discrete graphics hardware, but at least then the open-source hardware enablement should be much quicker with the initial groundwork in place.

The MFD updates for Linux 5.13 also include various new drivers and AX10 BMC secure updates for the Intel M10 BMC plus plenty of bug fixes throughout the subsystem.