Last few days I’ve been experimenting with XE driver for my Alder lake laptop (I have a Novacustom NV41 with i5-1240P).
I’ve enabled XE driver, enabled SR-IOV and passed one of VFs to a HVM VM. The system booted but after a short while the whole GPU hanged and I had to reset the system since I didn’t have any way to interact with the system.
I’ve disabled SR-IOV after that and while the GPU no longer hangs I get intermittent graphical artifacts.
The topics on XE I’ve found are either about using i915 driver or relatively old.
Before I dive into this issue: Has anyone tried XE on Alder Lake(12th gen Intel) recently? How does it work for You?
Last I tried xe on 6.19-rc8, and it was quite unusable, matching your experience. Note that officially xe driver supports only newer platforms (Lunar Lake+). I tried to get some help on #intel-gfx channel, but basically got response it’s unsupported configuration.
I was experimenting with i915 driver as documented in this guide: Virtualised Intel GPU with SR-IOV
Sriov is quite stable for me with 2 running VMs using a vgpu. The only difference is the used laptop, a Novacustom V54 in my case.
I’m using XE on 1245U and it is stable. But I’ve didn’t touched SR-IOV at all. It runs better than i915 for me. Only thing, iris dri (it is only dri that works/can be set with xe) required to disable igpu turbo in lenovo BIOS.
I’ve tried to get sr-iov running on Debian 13(6.19 kernel from backports) host running the same on a VM using kvm(libvirt). I was able to pass the VF to vm but I didn’t work there. There were some TLB errors in dmesg. So it’s not like xe working on “normal” system either.
I’ve also tried xen configuration for a moment (didn’t manage to setup any domUs) with xe on dom0 and there were no artifacts or instability. Might be due to the short time used it.
Intel lists xe driver for Alder Lake “production” by Intel.
I’m not going to dig deeper. Maybe I’ll check next year.