Daniel Vetter, an engineer at Intel and one of the maintainers of the DRM subsystem, posted on the Linux kernel developer mailing list a plan to promote patches with an implementation of the Xe driver intended for use with GPUs based on the Intel Xe architecture used in the Arc family of graphics cards. and integrated graphics, starting with Tiger Lake processors. The Xe driver is positioned as the basis for providing support for new chips, not tied to code to support older platforms. During 2023, the patches are planned to be made available for testing by enthusiasts, and, if possible, reviewed by non-Intel developers. In the optimistic scenario, the driver will be accepted into the main part of the kernel at the end of the year.
Currently, inclusion in the main kernel is hindered by the fact that the code was originally developed behind closed doors in a separate branch of the kernel, and now more work needs to be done to integrate it with the actual codebase. Given the recent negative experience of delaying the integration into the kernel of significant changes for the AMD driver, which led to the need to rewrite part of the code, in order to simplify the promotion of the prepared Xe driver codebase to the main kernel, it is proposed to first reach a consensus on the implementation of the scheduler and interaction with other drivers.
The Xe driver is built using a new architecture that makes more active use of existing DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) subsystem components, as well as typical i915 driver components that are not specific to specific GPUs, such as code for interacting with screens, memory model and implementation execbuf. The Xe and i915 drivers are planned to share common code to avoid duplication of generic components. In Mesa, the work of OpenGL and Vulkan on top of the Xe driver is implemented at the level of changes made to the existing Mesa drivers Iris and ANV.
Source: opennet.ru
