Linux 6.13 To Bring Big/Super Pages For The Raspberry Pi Graphics Driver - Better Performance

While the Linux 6.12 merge window only ended this weekend and won't be out until November, already code is beginning to accumulate for DRM-Next of graphics driver improvements targeting the Linux 6.13 cycle that in turn will be the first major Linux kernel release of 2025. A nice improvement is on the way for the Raspberry Pi graphics driver.

The Broadcom V3D kernel driver with Linux 6.13 is set to see big and super pages support. This effort has been months in the making and is around 1MB "super pages" support in the V3D driver and 64KB "big" pages to better the graphics performance. These larger page sizes are supported by the Broadcom V3D MMU and allows caching in the MMU.

The big pages and super pages can help with the performance for games/apps having high memory requirements. The big/super pages support for V3D can yield as much as 22% faster performance for some software on the Raspberry Pi 5.

This Raspberry Pi improvement was sent in last week as part of initial drm-misc-next changes targeting the Linux 6.13 kernel. There are also some AYANEO panel quirks as part of that pull request that are worth mentioning while the other early changes are mostly small patches.