Intel's New "Xe" Driver Submitted For Linux 6.8 Along With Imagination's PowerVR Driver

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel display/graphics driver changes have been submitted for the Linux 6.8 kernel. As expected and to much excitement, the experimental new Xe kernel graphics driver is included for introduction in Linux 6.8 as well as the Imagination PowerVR driver for select Rogue GPUs. Plus there's new AMDGPU driver additions and other improvements with this pull, including the initial AMD color management code.

After being announced at the end of 2022, the Xe kernel driver is being added to the Linux 6.8 kernel as the modern alternative to the i915 kernel driver. Though for all current hardware i915 is still used by default while Xe can optionally be used for Tigerlake (Gen12 graphics) and newer, including both discrete and integrated graphics. The current hope is that Xe will be ready to be used by default when it comes to Lunar Lake graphics. The Xe driver is a clean-sheet design (besides shared display code with i915) and thus able to better cater to modern Intel graphics architecture as well as making use of modern kernel interfaces and more without any legacy baggage in terms of maintaining user-space API or having to worry about older generations of Intel hardware. The i915 kernel driver will continue to be supported for all existing hardware.

My initial Xe benchmarks sum up the current state relative to i915. Expect many more Xe improvements to come over succeeding kernel cycles. Xe should ultimately provide better performance, support for Intel discrete graphics on non-x86/x86_64 architectures, and other features to come. The latest Mesa code is already adapted for Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan to make use of the Xe kernel driver.

The other new DRM driver for Linux 6.9 is the years-in-the-making Imagination PowerVR driver that for now supports select Rogue GPU IP. Development work so far has been focused on the AXE-1-16M GPU with the TI SK-AM62 board. This PowerVR open-source kernel driver works with the in-development PowerVR Vulkan driver within Mesa and then for OpenGL Zink can be used.

Linux 6.8 DRM changes also include dropping support for very old graphics drivers, DMA-BUF adds a fence timestamp helper and fence deadline support, SimpleFB now supports memory regions and power domains, and various new hardware support for the Freedreno driver. Also exciting is Raspberry Pi 5 graphics driver support for Linux 6.8.

On the AMD side, most exciting is initial bits of AMD color management support as worked on by AMD, Igalia, and Valve for the Steam Deck. The AMD color management properties code is not compiled by default but is being upstreamed now to ease development and make it easier for SteamOS and the Steam Deck to leverage. Hopefully it won't be too long before the code is exposed by default.

The AMDGPU driver also adds the ACPI WBRF bits for helping prevent WiFi radio interference on new Ryzen laptops between the WiFi and GPU clocks, more DCN 3.5 updates for RDNA3 refresh hardware, a rework to the PCIe link speed handling, various other updated IP bits, GFX11 golden register updates for the ideal RDNA3 state, and tunneling support for high priority compute.

Over in the DRM accelerator driver space, Intel Gaudi 2C device support is added for that new Gaudi 2 variant and the Intel IVPU driver for supporting the NPU on Meteor Lake and beyond has seen various refinements.

The full list of DRM feature updates for the Linux 6.8 merge window can be found via this pull.