Intel's Xe Driver Preps For SR-IOV Support & More Lunar Lake With Linux 6.11

On Thursday the first set of Intel Xe driver feature updates were submitted to DRM-Next of material intended for merging with the Linux 6.11 kernel in July.

This first set of Intel Xe driver updates has many changes including more work preparing for SR-IOV virtualization support as well as a lot more Lunar Lake (LNL) enablement. There is a lot of preparation work for SR-IOV support in this newer Intel kernel graphics driver but that functionality isn't yet fully wired up.

The Lunar Lake enablement for Xe remains ongoing and this will be the first generation where the Intel Xe driver is used by default rather than the i915 Direct Rendering Manager driver. It remains to be seen though if the Lunar Lake support will reach a stable (enabled by default / non-experimental) status for the Linux 6.11 kernel or not... With Lunar Lake laptops coming in Q3, it's racing down to the wire to see if there will be mainline support out-of-the-box and declared stable in time for launch day or not. But beyond that it's also a matter of whether it will be released in a stable kernel version by that point and in any event will be more of a challenge for non-rolling-release Linux distributions where users may need to wait for the likes of Ubuntu 24.10 before having a nice user experience. In any event I continue monitoring the Linux support for Intel Lunar Lake with its Xe2 graphics on a daily basis.

This round of Intel Xe driver updates also has a fix for Alder Lake N display detection, power management fixes, GuC updates, introducing a device wedged state, hardware monitoring fixes, per-client usage information reporting, and a variety of other low-level driver improvements.

See this round of Intel Xe driver updates for Linux 6.11 via this pull request. There will likely be more Intel graphics driver material submitted to DRM-Next over the next few weeks ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window opening up around mid-July.