14 DAY TRIAL // Developer Petri Latvala released a new update to the intel-gpu-tools software for debugging the Intel graphics driver on Linux-based operating systems that adds some interesting changes.
For those unfamiliar with intel-gpu-tools, it's a collection of tools for GNU/Linux distribution that allows the debugging the official Intel graphics driver for Intel GPUs. Tools include a GPU hang dumping program, performance microbenchmarks for regression testing the DRM, as well as a performance monitor.
The latest release, intel-gpu-tools 1.21, adds quite a bunch of changes, including automatic loading of DRM modules when opening a DRM device, much-improved GPU quiescing code to more thoroughly flush pending work and old data, as well as production support for the Meson build system while automake is still kept around.
Android support removed due to lack of use and maintenance
The intel-gpu-tools 1.21 release also improves the output of the intel_vbt_decode and intel_watermark functions, adds support for intel-gpu-overlay to display data from perf PMU, as well as to parse tracepoint locations from sysfs. Also, the intel_error_decode function can now print user buffers that contain debug logs.
Other than that, aubdump was updated to simulate execlist submission instead of using the older ring buffer submission method, the perf code was moved from intel-gpu-overlay to its own library, and the drm-uapi headers have been imported as copies instead of using those already available in the target system.
This update also removes a couple of things, such as Android support removed, due to lack of use and maintenance, support for the legacy CRC API, which is now part of the Linux kernel since version 4.10. You can download intel-gpu-tools 1.21 right now or install it from the software repositories of your favorite distro.