Kernel Driver Types
To obtain Linux* kernel-level support of Intel GPU products, you can use either upstream or out-of-tree drivers.
Out-of-tree drivers
Out-of-tree drivers are developed, maintained, and distributed independently of the mainline kernel source code of an operating system. These drivers are not included in the default kernel provided by the operating system or hypervisor vendor but are instead available as separate packages. Intel provides these drivers using the Dynamic Kernel Module System (DKMS), which rebuilds the Intel GPU kernel driver from the source for your target kernel. Out-of-tree drivers have additional features, exposed through additional kernel APIs, not enabled in the upstream driver found on kernel.org. The following features are only available in the out-of-tree i915 kernel module:
Virtual Memory Binding (VM_BIND) and Ultra Low Latency Submission (ULLS)
For data center GPUs, including Intel® Data Center GPU Max Series and Intel® Data Center GPU Flex Series, the out-of-tree drivers are the only drivers validated by Intel.
Upstream drivers
Upstream drivers are included and maintained within the mainline kernel source code of an operating system. These drivers are developed in collaboration with the broader open-source community and are integrated into the official kernel releases by the operating system maintainers. The kernel.org kernel is pulled into various distributions as part of their release cycle. If you wish to use the upstream driver, refer to your operating system vendor’s documentation on obtaining and installing kernels that are not yet part of that distribution.
GPU driver support
The following table lists the currently supported GPUs and their kernel driver support.
GPU |
Out-of-tree |
Upstream |
|---|---|---|
Intel® Data Center GPU Max Series |
Supported |
Not supported |
Intel® Data Center GPU Flex Series |
Supported |
Not supported |
Intel® Arc™ A-series |
Supported* |
Supported for kernel 6.2 and later |
Integrated |
Supported** |
Depends on a platform |
* Requires Intel Mesa packages for rendering and display.
** Intel does not validate integrated support in out-of-tree drivers with each release.
Preliminary APIs and user space packages
The APIs exposed in the out-of-tree kernel driver that are not merged upstream are referred to as the PRELIM API. If you use the out-of-tree drivers to leverage features not available from upstream, you need to use the user space packages provided by Intel:
Component |
Source |
PRELIM API compatible |
kernel.org compatible |
|---|---|---|---|
Compute |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Media |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Mesa |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Compute |
Upstream |
No |
Yes |
Media |
Upstream |
No |
Yes |
Mesa |
Upstream |
No |
Yes |
For information on configuring Intel’s graphics package repository and installing the packages on your operating system, see the Installation guide.
Drivers for virtual environments
For virtual environments operating on VMware ESXi, Intel provides the specialized Intel® Data Center Graphics Driver for VMware ESXi for Intel® Data Center GPU Flex Series. This driver facilitates the usage of Intel Data Center GPUs within virtual desktops (VDI), AI workloads, and other applications by efficiently sharing GPU resources among multiple concurrently running virtual machines.