Linux 5.14 To Begin Enabling The Intel Graphics TTM Memory Management Bits for dGPUs

While a decade ago Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers resisted TTM at the time and instead devised the Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) for kernel graphics memory management needs in its place, now with discrete graphics cards and dedicated video memory, Intel has been working on making use of TTM memory management for those purposes. With Linux 5.14 the initial bits are going to be there for using TTM by the Intel driver when running with discrete graphics having local memory.

Last month I wrote about Intel working on TTM integration for discrete video memory management with their forthcoming discrete graphics products. The Intel kernel graphics driver's existing GEM memory management code remains and no change of code path for existing hardware support.

The initial enabling of TTM device and memory managers for handling local memory "LMEM" on discrete graphics "dGFX" was sent in on Thursday as part of drm-intel-gt-next to DRM-Next ahead of Linux 5.14. Again, existing Intel graphics support is unchanged but this is ultimately about the continued discrete Xe Graphics bring-up for hardware moving forward.

This pull request also has improvements to Intel's GuC submission back-end in preparation for enabling on newer platforms. The pull additionally now starts enabling HuC loading by default for future Gen12 platforms past Rocket Lake and Tiger Lake, namely for Alder Lake.

Outside of this memory management related work, there are also many other Intel graphics driver improvements coming for Linux 5.14.

The Linux 5.14 cycle will kickoff around the end of the month while the stable release will be out later this summer and in time for the autumn Linux distribution releases.