Chapter 4. drm/i915 Intel GFX Driver

Table of Contents

Display Hardware Handling
Mode Setting Infrastructure
Plane Configuration
Output Probing
Memory Management and Command Submission

The drm/i915 driver supports all (with the exception of some very early models) integrated GFX chipsets with both Intel display and rendering blocks. This excludes a set of SoC platforms with an SGX rendering unit, those have basic support through the gma500 drm driver.

Display Hardware Handling

This section covers everything related to the display hardware including the mode setting infrastructure, plane, sprite and cursor handling and display, output probing and related topics.

Mode Setting Infrastructure

The i915 driver is thus far the only DRM driver which doesn't use the common DRM helper code to implement mode setting sequences. Thus it has its own tailor-made infrastructure for executing a display configuration change.

Plane Configuration

This section covers plane configuration and composition with the primary plane, sprites, cursors and overlays. This includes the infrastructure to do atomic vsync'ed updates of all this state and also tightly coupled topics like watermark setup and computation, framebuffer compression and panel self refresh.

Output Probing

This section covers output probing and related infrastructure like the hotplug interrupt storm detection and mitigation code. Note that the i915 driver still uses most of the common DRM helper code for output probing, so those sections fully apply.