Intel Xe2/Battlemage & AMD RDNA4 Lead The Graphics Driver Changes In Linux 6.11

DRM subsystem lead maintainer David Airlie recently submitted the DRM-Next pull request for merging into Linux 6.11. All of that Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) feature code has landed for the many kernel graphics/display driver updates along with changes to the few AI accelerator "accel" drivers also part of the tree. As usual, the Intel Xe/i915 and AMD AMDGPU/AMDKFD kernel drivers see a bulk of the upstream open-source graphics improvements.

There is a lot of graphics/display kernel driver updates for Linux 6.11, including new hardware support, performance optimizations, and other features being wired up. Some of the highlights for Linux 6.11 include:

- AMD has upstreamed a lot of their RDNA4 (GFX12) kernel driver support. There is GC 12.0 support, DCN 4.0.x Display Core Next IP, GMC 12.0, SDMA 7.0, MES 12, MMHUB 4.1, and other new graphics IP blocks. It looks like with Linux 6.11 the initial RDNA4/GFX12 support should be in fairly good shape. With new patches, RDNA4 support is to be exposed by default rather than leaving it behind an experimental flag.

- AMDKFD for the compute driver also has RDNA4/GFX12 support, contiguous vRAM allocations support, SR-IOV fixes, and other improvements.

- Intel meanwhile has been busy enabling Xe2 graphics both for upcoming integrated graphics on Lunar Lake and then for next-gen Battlemage graphics cards. Linux 6.11 brings initial Battlemage display support, the initial Battlemage device PCI IDs, and a lot of other Xe2 work. As of Linux 6.11 the Battlemage and Lunar Lake graphics support remains experimental / disabled by default.

- The Intel driver also enables Panel Replay support, CMRR as Content Match Refresh Rate as a new Adaptive Sync like feature for Lunar Lake, and various other code improvements.

- The Intel Xe kernel graphics driver has also been seeing a lot of improvements in general, initial hardware monitoring (HWMON) support, and other features to get ready for its use by default beginning with Xe2 hardware.

- The Intel iVPU NPU accelerator driver has also seen new support. There is NPU hardware scheduler support, profiling capabilities, better firmware handling, clock/power management enhancements, and scheduler improvements.

- Meanwhile with the Intel Habana Labs accelerator driver is support for the new Gaudi 2D revision. Details are still light about this "D" revision of Gaudi 2.

- The DRM Panic infrastructure for allowing a "[Blue] Screen of Death" on Linux systems now allows monochrome logo support, selectable fonts, dumping the kernel message to the screen, and other improvements.

- DRM core supports a new monochrome TV mode as added by Raspberry Pi developers.

- The MSM DRM driver enables X185 support as the Qualcomm Adreno GPU found within Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 laptop SoCs. Qualcomm Adreno A5505 and SM7150 support is also wired up.

- BMC output support for the MGAG200 driver.

- Nouveau NVreg_RegistryDwords support.

- The Panfrost DRM driver now supports the MediaTek MT8188 SoC.

See this pull for the full list of DRM kernel display/graphics driver updates along with the AI accelerator driver updates. Linux 6.11 kernel benchmarking will get underway once the merge window closes this Sunday with the Linux 6.11-rc1 release.