Complementing yesterday’s initial set of Intel graphics driver feature patches planned for Linux 6.15, a drm-xe-next pull request was also submitted to DRM-Next containing a lot of new feature code for the modern Xe kernel Direct Rendering Manager driver. There’s a few fun features on the Xe side for Linux 6.15.
First there’s a bit of a controversial feature… PXP HWDRM is landing for the Xe driver and enabled for Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake GPUs. The DRM this time is around Digital Rights Management and is with the Protected Xe Path. I’ve covered the Intel Protected Xe Path (PXP) in the past for the Intel i915 kernel driver and now similar treatment for the Xe driver and enabling its usage for Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake graphics.
Protected Xe Path allows for encrypted video memory and a trusted execution environment for hardware-protected GPU sessions for dealing with DRM’ed/protected contents and the like. With the new Xe patches being merged for PXP HWDRM, it’s summed up as:
“PXP (Protected Xe Path) allows execution and flip to display of protected (i.e. encrypted) objects. The HW supports multiple types of PXP, but this series only introduces support for PXP HWDRM, which is mainly targeted at encrypting data that is going to be displayed.
Even though we only plan to support 1 type of PXP for now, the interface has been designed to allow support for other PXP types to be added at a later point in time.
A user is expected to mark both BO and exec_queues as using PXP and the driver will make sure that PXP is running, that the encryption is valid and that no execution happens with an outdated encryption.”
One nice feature being merged to Xe for Linux 6.15 is adding support for exposing the GPU package and VRAM temperatures to user-space via the hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem. Great finally having GPU core and VRAM temperature reporting with the modern Xe driver.
This new pull request also adds mmap() support for PCI memory barrier, integration with the perf PMU, and a new survivability mode. The Intel survivability mode for the Xe driver is putting the driver into a state capable of firmware upgrades on critical failures. The survivability mode in the patches is further described as:
“Boot Survivability is a software based workflow for recovering a system in a failed boot state. Here system recoverability is concerned with recovering the firmware responsible for boot.
This is implemented by loading the driver with bare minimum (no drm card) to allow the firmware to be flashed through mei-gsc and collect telemetry. The driver’s probe flow is modified such that it enters survivability mode when pcode initialization is incomplete and boot status denotes a failure.”
Hopefully this is the precursor to the Intel graphics firmware updating support via LVFS/Fwupd.
This pull also adds more Battlemage PCI IDs, more PCI IDs for Panther Lake, other Xe3 Panther Lake preparations, and various fixes. See this pull request for the full list of feature patches being queued on the Intel Xe driver side for Linux 6.15.
