Intel Display Driver

The Intel display driver provides the display, or Kernel Mode Setting (KMS), support for both the drm/xe and drm/i915 Intel GPU drivers.

The source code currently resides under drivers/gpu/drm/i915/display due to historical reasons, and it’s compiled separately into both drm/xe and drm/i915 kernel modules.

The drm/xe and drm/i915 drivers are the “core” or “parent” drivers for display, as they initialize and own the drm device, and pass that on to the display driver. The display driver isn’t an independent driver in that sense.