Linux 3.19 To Have Skylake Graphics, PPGTT Enablement

Now that Linux 3.18-rc1 is out, Intel's Open-Source Technology Center developers responsible for their graphics driver work have begun submitting their changes to drm-next for landing with Linux 3.19.

Daniel Vetter sent in the first batch of drm-intel-next changes for merging into the drm-next tree so that they can hit the Linux 3.19 merge window in about two months. Among the highlights for this Intel DRM graphics driver work for Linux 3.19 include:

- The initial hardware enablement for Skylake, Intel's successor to Broadwell that's expected to launch by end of 2015. There's been the Skylake kernel graphics driver code for a few weeks now but it missed out on the Linux 3.18 window. Published since then has been the Skylake Mesa code and updated DDX for user-space.

- Some of the first work for better Intel driver code documentation.

- PPGTT is now again enabled by default. PPGTT is short for the Per-Process Graphics Translation Tables. PPGTT is a feature supported by Intel's Ivy Bridge, Haswell, and Broadwell graphics processors for enabling GPU process isolation. This enhances the security by providing a per file descriptor address space / context.

- Many fixes and other improvements throughout the driver.

More details on the Intel Linux graphics driver improvements being queued for the 3.19 kernel can be found via this pull request.