News: 0001532877

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Intel Preps Xe3's "Dirty Rect" Feature For Linux 6.15

([Intel] 9 Minutes Ago Dirty Rectangle FBC)


Along with [1]other exciting Intel kernel graphics driver updates submitted for the upcoming Linux 6.15 merge window, another batch of drm-intel-next code was sent out today to DRM-Next. This pull request is mostly around bug fixing and other low-level work but it does provide a new "dirty rect" feature being introduced with next-gen Intel Xe3 graphics.

This "dirty rect" feature for next-gen Xe3 Panther Lake graphics and Celestial discrete graphics is around allowing frame-buffer compression (FBC) on dirty rectangles. Dirty rectangles are the portions of the screen/frame-buffer that have been modified. The patch adding the support for this new Xe3 GPU feature explains:

"Initial patchset to support dirty rect capability for FBC in Xe3. This is the initial design suggestion for the feedback. This is for non PSR cases.

...

drm/i915/xe3: add dirty rect support for FBC

Dirty rectangle feature allows FBC to recompress a subsection of a frame. When this feature is enabled, display will read the scan lines between dirty rectangle start line and dirty rectangle end line in subsequent frames."

This FBC dirty rectangle support for Xe3 is part of today's drm-intel-next pull for Linux 6.15. This feature should help with bandwidth savings and energy efficiency. There is also some display updates, code refactoring, and a number of different fixes.

See [2]this pull request for the likely final batch of Intel kernel graphics driver feature updates going into the Linux 6.15 merge window later in March.

The open-source Xe3 graphics driver enablement with a focus on Panther Lake integrated graphics have been ongoing for a while and given the flow of new feature patches remains ongoing. If all goes well this open-source Linux driver support for Xe3/PTL will be all buttoned up by the back-half of the year prior to the next-gen Core Ultra laptops shipping.



[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Xe-SVM-For-Linux-6.15

[2] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/dri-devel/2025-March/495152.html


phoronix

The more a man is imbued with the ordered regularity of all events, the firmer
becomes his conviction that there is no room left by the side of this ordered
regularity for causes of a different nature. For him neither the rule of
human nor the rule of divine will exists as an independent cause of natural
events. To be sure, the doctrine of a personal God interfering with natural
events could never be refuted, in the real sense, by science, for this
doctrine can always take refuge in those domains in which scientific knowledge
has not yet been able to set foot.

But I am persuaded that such behavior on the part of the representatives
of religion would not only be unworthy but also fatal. For a doctrine which
is able to maintain itself not in clear light, but only in the dark, will
of necessity lose its effect on mankind, with incalculable harm to human
progress. In their struggle for the ethical good, teachers of religion
must have the stature to give up the doctrine of a personal God, that is,
give up that source of fear and hope which in the past placed such vast
powers in the hands of priests. In their labors they will have to avail
themselves of those forces which are capable of cultivating the Good, the
True, and the Beautiful in humanity itself. This is, to be sure, a more
difficult but an incomparably more worthy task.
-- Albert Einstein