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Comment by transpute | Hacker News Reader

> Xe2, Intel is looking to use the same graphics architecture across their product stack.. integrated GPUs as a springboard into the discrete GPU market.

Linux support for Xe2 and power management will take time to mature, https://www.phoronix.com/forums/forum/linux-graphics-x-org-d...

Xe SR-IOV improves VM graphics performance. Intel dropped Xe1 SR-IOV graphics virtualization in the upstream i915 driver, but the OSS community has continued improvement in an LTS fork, making steady progress, https://github.com/strongtz/i915-sriov-dkms/commits/master/ & https://github.com/Upinel/PVE-Intel-vGPU?tab=readme-ov-file.

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Aww man this is so disappointing. Intel has a pretty good track record with their Linux drivers. Too bad cost-cutting seems to have reached driver development too.

Intel has been developing a new graphics driver stack for Xe, which will officially support SR-IOV from Xe2 onward, https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-New-Xe-Linux-Driver. It makes sense to focus Intel resources on the new hardware and driver architecture, but thanks to OSS, the existing stable driver can also be improved by community contributions.

Impact appears to be limited, https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Maintainers-Linux-Depart

The issue that phoronix is facing might be due to a power management bug that is not related to the driver at all.

> Intel dropped Xe1 SR-IOV graphics virtualization in the upstream i915 driver,

I missed this. Wow this is disappointing.

I remember being somewhat excited for Intel dGPUs since I had a real interest in a card that could do GVT-g and also might have super low idle power consumption like their iGPUs that would fit well with my VM server. We ended up with GVT-g canceled and promising of SR-IOV coming eventually and dGPUs with atrocious idle power consumption!

Not sure if we need to support SRIOV on the HW. VirtIO GPU native contexts should be good enough for most consumers.

I imagine SRIOV would be useful for more advanced usecases

SR-IOV is a rare competitive advantage of Intel GPUs over Nvidia/AMD.

Why would Intel give up that advantage by directing customers to software GPU virtualization that works on AMD and Nvidia GPUs?

Because implementing designing/manufacturing/validating SR-IOV HW is expensive. It's not something that would be useful as a differentiating feature for most consumer grade HW.

Intel vPro CPUs with iGPUs are used by the Fortune 500 enterprise industrial base. Intel hardware is already segmented for enterprise markets and they enable/disable features for specific markets.

There's lots of hardware competition for consumers, including upcoming Arm laptops from Mediatek and Nvidia. Intel can use feature-limited SKUs in both CPUs and GPUs to target specific markets with cheaper hardware and reduced functionality.

I'd wager it's a volume thing. Not enough Linux customers asking for SRIOV support, so it's not worth spending the money to enable driver support for it. The Fortune 500 companies that you mention should specifically ask for SRIOV support on linux mainline when making purchases. Unfortunately, that's the only way to make sure we have support upstreamed.

The silver lining seems to be that more and more things are moving into the firmware, and it's entirely possible that SRIOV could be supported through that in the future. But till then, I doubt it's going to happen.

So the state of Xe support on Linux is pretty good ? Is it worth it to run Linux on Alder Lake, can it take advantage of the full power of the iGPU ?

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