Linux 6.0 Graphics Driver Changes Preparing For Intel DG2/Alchemist & AMD RDNA3

Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem maintainer David Airlie has submitted all of the open-source GPU/display driver updates for the Linux 6.0 (nee 5.20) merge window. Much of this work is centered around bringing up the Intel Arc Graphics DG2/Alchemist discrete graphics cards and on the AMD side continued work around enabling RDNA3 and Instinct MI300 graphics processors.

Intel's open-source driver engineers have been busy working out the Intel DG2/Alchemist desktop Arc Graphics cards and Arctic Sound M. In Linux 5.19 they began exposing the compute support to user-space and now for Linux 6.0 there is small BAR support and other necessary bits in place. Linux 6.0 seems to be the minimum viable version of the Linux kernel that is useful for upcoming Arc Graphics desktop hardware, but it's still not enabled by default. With Linux 6.0 the Intel DG2 graphics cards will still require setting the i915.force_probe=[PCI-ID] module option for enabling the accelerated graphics support. Hopefully by Linux 6.1 the support will be fully ironed out and enabled by default.

Intel Arc Graphics

The Linux 6.0 DRM changes also include early enablement work on Ponte Vecchio but further work is needed there before being complete. There is also early preparations for Meteor Lake graphics although more patches there are coming for Linux 6.1. Likewise, Linux 6.0 has more work on Intel Raptor Lake as the successor to Alder Lake coming out later this year.

On the AMD side, there is more enablement of new GPU IP blocks in AMDGPU and AMDKFD for the forthcoming Radeon RDNA3 and next-gen CDNA-based Instinct MI300 hardware. It's not clear due to their block-by-block approach if the RDNA3 support is completely ready with Linux 6.0 or if other bits remain... Hopefully it will be in good shape for Linux 6.0 to allow nice out-of-the-box support at launch.

The AMDKFD compute driver with this kernel has added peer-to-peer (P2P) DMA support using DMA-BUF, an ioctl for reporting available vRAM, Heterogeneous Memory Management (HMM) profiler support, and other improvements.

Some other DRM highlights for Linux 6.0 include the V3D kernel driver being ready for the Raspberry Pi 4 upstream, MSM DRM driver support for the Qualcomm Adreno 619, Panfrost support for the Arm Mali Valhall, display improvements for Nouveau, frame-buffer console scrolling improvements, and a new "logicvc" driver for the LogiCVC display IP.

The full list of DRM patches for Linux 6.0 can be found via the pull request. Linux 6.0 Intel/AMD graphics driver benchmarks will be coming out soon.