Intel Begins Sorting Out SR-IOV Support For The Xe Kernel Graphics Driver

before anyone gets too excited, this doesn't seem like it applies to DG2 gaming cards, ATSM and PVC are compute cards

+SR-IOV Capability
+=================
+
+Due to SR-IOV complexity and required co-operation between hardware, firmware
+and kernel drivers, not all Xe architecture platforms might have SR-IOV enabled
+or fully functional.
+
+To control at the driver level which platform will provide support for SR-IOV,
+as we can't just rely on the PCI configuration data exposed by the hardware,
+we will introduce "has_sriov" flag to the struct xe_device_desc that describes
+a device capabilities that driver checks during the probe.
+
+Initially this flag will be set to disabled even on platforms that we plan to
+support. We will enable this flag only once we finish merging all required
+changes to the driver and related validated firmwares are also made available.
+
+
+SR-IOV Platforms
+================
+
+Initially we plan to add SR-IOV functionality to the following SDV platforms
+already supported by the Xe driver:
+
+ - TGL (up to 7 VFs)
+ - ADL (up to 7 VFs)
+ - MTL (up to 7 VFs)
+ - ATSM (up to 31 VFs)
+ - PVC (up to 63 VFs)
+
+Newer platforms will be supported later, but we hope that enabling will be
+much faster, as majority of the driver changes are either platform agnostic
+or are similar between earlier platforms (hence we start with SDVs).

This is the best summary I could come up with:

One of the great aspects of Intel integrated and discrete graphics is the broad support for Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV).

Intel "Gen12" graphics back to Tigerlake can handle SR-IOV when there aren't any firmware woes or other issues at play.

For most users these details won't mean much besides the refreshing fact of Intel continuing to support SR-IOV across their spectrum of graphics products on Linux moving forward.

Those curious about all the fine technical details on the SR-IOV support plans for the Intel Xe Direct Rendering Manager driver can find their RFC design document on the dri-devel mailing list.

The Intel Xe DRM kernel driver has yet to be mainlined to the Linux kernel even in experimental form, but hopefully we'll finally see that happen in the early months of 2024 to make it easier for testing and evaluation by enthusiasts.

The Xe driver is designed around modern graphics needs and kernel interfaces compared to i915, ultimately should be faster with all the improvements, better support features like sparse resources, and will also be better supported on non-x86 kernels for those using Intel Arc Graphics on the like of AArch64 / POWER / RISC-V.

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