Ahead of the Linux 6.18-rc2 release on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) fixes for the week were sent out today. There is the usual assortment of different kernel graphics driver fixes, mostly with the Intel and AMD drivers as usual. In particular a few Intel driver fixes make this week's pull worth mentioning.

Included as part of this week's DRM fixes for Linux 6.18 is [1]a patch for the modern Intel Xe driver to enable media sampler power gating. This patch enables media sampler power gating for pre-Xe2 platforms to help in GPU power savings when those engines are idle. As this is for pre-Xe2, it's for those force_probe disabling the i915 driver and opting instead to use the Xe driver in its place, a move that [2]can help deliver extra performance over the old i915 driver code.

The Xe driver's powergate_info DebugFS file also now reports the media samplers power gating state too for verifying if the power-savings functionality is active.

There is also a [3]patch for deactivating Panel Self Refresh (PSR) only on Lunar Lake and when selective fetch is enabled. That patch in turn should fix [4]rendering artifacts appearing on older Intel graphics platforms .

The other Intel Xe and AMDGPU kernel driver fixes for the week is the usual random assortment of different collected bug fixes following the recent Linux 6.18 merge window. The full list of DRM kernel graphics driver fixes for the week via [5]this pull request .



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/20251010011047.2047584-1-vinay.belgaumkar@intel.com/

[2] https://www.phoronix.com/review/intel-mtl-i915-xe-linux

[3] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/kernel/-/commit/95355766e5871e9cdc574be5a3b115392ad33aea

[4] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/drm/i915/kernel/-/issues/14946

[5] https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CAPM=9ty=C+PAgZD44Y_LkUuKkRtLFGffjX9rZX8=fkP0s-8zSg@mail.gmail.com/