Intel Graphics Driver Patches Revived For Per-Client Engine Activity

One of the interesting Intel Linux graphics driver patches to be sent out last year were for per-client engine reporting to allow on a per-application/process basis to see how the GPU's render/blitter/video engines were being utilized.

That work for per-client "engine busyness" reporting went through a few rounds of review but as of Linux 5.9 there still isn't the support within Intel's i915 kernel driver.

But a new spin of the patches have been sent out providing hope the functionality will still materialize soon for mainline. The kernel driver patches expose the per-client engine data to user-space via sysfs so that utilities can be created or adapted to make use of this information. It's also possible the driver itself can then better utilize this information moving forward with smarter scheduling decisions and other behavioral changes.

The new patches have a fix around the GEM code and clean up some warnings. We'll see if this kernel-side support gets picked up for Linux 5.10 or another near-term kernel release.