For improving the open-source graphics driver support for Qualcomm Adreno 700 series hardware such as what's found in the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 and other SoCs, preemption support is finally being tackled.

The preemption support is for allowing the GPU to switch to its higher priority ring when work is submitted to it compared to the standard/normal ring. By being able to immediately address work on the high priority ring, there can be lower latency for high priority workloads.

[1]This kernel patch series gets the Adreno 700 series preemption support working on the MSM DRM driver.

This kernel work goes along with [2]this Mesa merge request for enabling preemption on the Adreno 700 series within Mesa's Turnip Vulkan driver. This also makes use of a new "skipsaverestore" feature for faster L1 per-bin preemption by allowing the skipping of saving/restoring state and relying on the user-space driver code to restore registers.



[1] https://lore.kernel.org/dri-devel/20240815-preemption-a750-t-v1-0-7bda26c34037@gmail.com/T/#m42504815741fc44f1f7859ed82c8d4a852144548

[2] https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/merge_requests/30544