Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics/display driver updates for Linux 6.8 include new Intel "Xe" DRM and PowerVR Imagination drivers, experimental AMD color management properties, Raspberry Pi 5 graphics support, and more.
However, Linus Torvalds recently discovered when merging related code that some newly submitted Intel Xe driver code was "seriously lacking" in testing. In this regard, he expressed his dissatisfaction on the kernel mailing list :
Your testing is woefully inadequate. Can't even build, the reason seems to be that commit b49e894c3fd8 ("drm/i915: Replace custom intel runtime_pm tracker with ref_tracker library") changes the "intel_wakeref_t" type from "deep_stack_handle_t" to "unsigned long"...
How unpleasant. I've fixed the corrupted Xe compat header and finished the build, but this is definitely not how things should be. How did I end up in this situation? No build testing was done.
Why does the %^!@$% header file include C files? In any case, this error should not occur.
Compared with some of the previous "hot" replies, Linus's wording this time can be said to be moderate, and he also raised some reasonable questions. In fact, at the Linux Foundation's Japan Open Source Summit at the end of 2023 , Linus said that he had restrained his temper and would no longer "give the middle finger to some companies" after learning some lessons.
But as Phoronix said, Linus has merged the new code into Linux 6.8 anyway. Hopefully this is just a one-off issue with the Intel Xe driver and not a larger code quality issue.
More details can be found on the mailing list .
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