Intel Battlemage “Xe2” GPU Gets More Optimizations Ahead Of The Recent Pull Request For Linux 6.12 Kernel

Intel Battlemage "Xe2" GPU Gets More Optimizations Ahead Of The Recent Pull Request For Linux 6.12 Kernel 1

The final set of updates has been submitted at Linux 6.12 Kernel, ensuring better optimizations for Intel Xe2 GPUs in Lunar Lake SoCs & Battlemage discrete GPUs.

The Battlemage "Xe2" GPUs look almost ready for the Linux operating system. With the upcoming Intel products, including Lunar Lake chips and the Battlemage-based discrete GPUs, the support for the Battlemage Graphics for Linux 6.12 is in the final stage. The final batch including the new changes, features, and improvements for the new hardware has now been submitted, which follows the recent pull request for the Lunar Lake and Battlemage Graphics for Linux 6.12 kernel.

The new feature updates will optimize the performance of the Intel Battlemage graphics for Linux 6.12, which will now be enabled in the next kernel cycle. The Linux 6.12 merge window is going to open this month, the same month when we are going to see the launch of Intel Lunar Lake chips for mobile platforms on the 3rd. The pull request also includes the recent change for the Linux 6.11 kernel, which contains the patch for checking the Arrow Lake GSC firmware.

The patch fixes various bugs that appear in the latest pull request as follows:

Xe core changes for BMG. BMG requires, by design, 64k memory size alignment for scanout buffers using compression and 4-tile. So, we are adding a protection here to block framebuffers that are not aligned with that and that requires patches in both i915-display and xe core. Without this protection, we get some screen corruptions. So we need to propagate this along with the force_probe removal that Lucas sent yesterday with drm-xe-next pull request.

Although Arrow Lake has pretty much same GT as Meteor Lake, it requires a new GSC firmware or HuC authentication and buffer protection might not work. So, we had to spin out ARL ids from MTL and introduce this new firmware requirement. At this moment no one should have HW with these IDs yet and we will propagate this to stable as soon as it hits Linus tree.

via Kernel.org

Some of the new changes include:

Cross-driver (xe-core) Changes:

Require BMG scanout buffers to be 64k physically aligned (Maarten)

Core (drm) Changes:

Introducing Xe2 ccs modifiers for integrated and discrete graphics (Juha-Pekka)

Driver Changes:

General cleanup and more work moving towards intel_display isolation (Jani)

New display workaround (Suraj)

Use correct cp_irq_count on HDCP (Suraj)

eDP PSR fix when CRC is enabled (Jouni)

Fix DP MST state after a sink reset (Imre)

Fix Arrow Lake GSC firmware version (John)

Use chained DSBs for LUT programming (Ville)

The merge window for 6.12 is going to open in mid-September while the stable 6.12 kernel will be officially out in November this year. Hence, users who are going to buy Lunar Lake-based laptops and want to have optimized Xe2 GPU performance out of the box will need to use the Linux 6.12 Git kernel. However, those who want to settle with the 6.11 kernel can try out the experimental support.

That said, Intel has also released its newest VPL(Video Processing Library) version: VPL 2.13, which adds new APIs for adding support for new features. These are the AV1 Screen Content Tools for handling screen content, Encoded Picture Quality Information to provide more details about the video quality after compression, Alpha Channel Encoding for videos having some see-through parts, AI-Based Frame Interpolation for generating newer frames for smoother video playback, and AI-Based Super Resolution Support for upscaling lower-resolution videos.

The VPL 2.13 will add support for the discrete Battlemage GPUs and will also include "hello-encode-jpeg" Code Example to help new developers understand how to use the VPL to encode an image into JPEG format.

News Source: Phoronix