News in the DRM section
Direct Rendering Manager, DRM for short, will also bring a number of nice new features in Linux 6.3, many of which are already on their way in the development branch. But in addition, it will also lose some old drivers, which we have known for a few weeks now.
One of the biggest innovations is the new subsystem of updates for accelerators (accel), which will form the building block of further changes in GPU support through graphics drivers or AI operation accelerators. This computing subsystem for AI debuted in Linux 6.2, but that was the basic infrastructure on top of which other blocks are now being built. Among other things, the developers have already prepared the migration of the existing Intel Habana Labs driver support (char/misc) to this new subsystem. The second driver in this first batch is the driver for specific Intel Gaudi / Gaudi2 / Greco accelerators, introduced in the last generations last summer. There are also other controllers for AI accelerators on the way upstream.
On the other hand, DRI1 drivers for very old graphics such as ATI Rage 128, 3Dfx, S3 Savage, Intel 810, SiS, VIA and Matrox MGA disappear from the core – we are also talking about 20-year-old or more old products that cannot even be called GPUs yet, and usually for a product that hasn’t been touched for years.
Intel GPUs in more detail
For “regular graphics cards”, we can find the updated DRM i915 driver in the six-three, improving the support of the DG2/Alchemist generation, i.e. the current cards of the Intel Arc family. Furthermore, in the next version of the kernel, the developers from Intel will offer the basic operation of the GPU part of the future processors of the Meteor Lake family (the successor of the current generation Raptor Lake, about whose exact launch date and parameters or the availability of desktop models we can only philosophize at the moment). There will also be support for DisplayPort MST DSC (i.e. multistream with compression) or Xe HP 4Tile graphics from the Ponte Vecchio product family. And also many improvements in the low-level part of the code.
In Intel, too, by the way is working on a new kernel driver for (i)Xe family GPUs, however the code is not yet upstream mature. However, one day this driver will replace the aforementioned i915 classic, which will remain the default for Intel GPUs of generations older than Gen12/Xe. As Phoronix stated a few days ago, with a bit of luck, the new controller could be released upstream during this year, so let’s keep our fingers crossed for Intel, because with the switch to it, developers will be freed from the big balls of backward compatibility and the now inefficient architectural nuances of the old i915 .
AMD plans
It’s easy for AMD, its AMDGPU driver is continuously updated, which is why the latest generation of GPUs, called RDNA3, have been being worked on for the last few weeks or months. AMD is planning to support additional IP blocks, i.e. new GPU variants falling into this architecture (there is not much of RDNA3 on the market yet).
There will be support for transferring information about PCI Express to user space, support for secure display working with multiple displays, revised code for S0ix suspend, FreeSync via PCon and also various low-level improvements.
Let’s add that AMD already has a successor RDNA4 architecture in development, but it’s too early to talk about the details.
More DRM news
Linux 6.3 will also bring the use of the so-called SimpleDRM, i.e. an architecturally newer replacement for the good old device in the form of a framebuffer driver ( fbdev), which uses an emulation layer for backward compatibility. The old IOCTL support will disappear from the nouveau driver, there will be a number of updates in the MSM driver for the Adreno GPU in ARM chips from the American Qualcomm (usually we will learn the details later after the development branch has moved to a newer version), the Raspberry Pi VC4 driver will receive various fixes and will not be missing nor support for VeriSilicon NPU cores in Etnaviv, a reverse-engineered Vivante GC-series embedded GPU driver.
Ath12k driver for Qualcomm Wi-Fi 7
In the network part of the kernel, a significant evolutionary novelty is emerging for version 6.3. Ath12k driver will have its premiere in six-three and will provide Linux with Wi-Fi 7 solution support from Qualcomm. In the first phase, there will be two solutions, PCI(e) device QCN9274/WCN7850 (known as Qualcomm FastConnect 7800 with support for speeds up to 5.8 Gbit/s). This new driver originally started as a fork of the previous ath11k in an effort to be a clean new solution, while representing only a portion (however significant) of the code needed to support Qualcomm’s generation of Wi-Fi 7 products. For now, it is in the middle of development, it supports “only” 802.11ax mode, and we will have to wait for WiFi 7 Extremely High Throughput (EHT) with 802.11be support. There are more details available in Jakub Kicinski’s pull requesta developer working for Meta (Facebook).
