Linux 7.3 graphics: What Igalia changed for drivers and VRAM

Linux 7.3 brings targeted graphics and memory-management changes from Igalia: a reorganized V3D job-submission path, more reliable V3D performance counters, and lower CPU use during AMDGPU job submission. The performance result Igalia describes is CPU utilization, not measured game FPS.

Igalia reports 69 patches authored and 59 reviewed for the release. NeoTeo previously covered Linux 7.3’s networking updates; this set of changes concerns graphics drivers and device memory.

In this article

• V3D reorganizes submissions and improves counter reliability
• AMDGPU reduces CPU work during job submission
• AMD’s HDR correction has a defined hardware scope
• Lowering a cgroup’s dmem.max can wait for reclaim
• Igalia’s other kernel work and the V3D plan

V3D reorganizes submissions and improves counter reliability

V3D, the Raspberry Pi graphics-driver family, now represents a submission chain as an ordered array of jobs. The change covers render, texture and compute submissions. Igalia describes the shared path as an improvement to readability and robustness.

Performance-monitor locking also serializes work across queues when a monitor is attached. That helps make the resulting counter values more reliable for profiling and debugging. It is a change to how work and measurements are coordinated, rather than a reported frame-rate gain.

AMDGPU reduces CPU work during job submission

Igalia reports reduced CPU utilization in AMDGPU job submission. The changes include removing an unused buffer-object-list mutex, caching checks for invariant IP conditions, and reducing how often idle workers are re-armed. AMDGPU’s context and buffer-list paths also move from IDR to XArray, a different data structure used to manage those objects.

The reported benefit is lower CPU use in this part of the driver. It is not an FPS measurement, so it does not establish a general gaming-performance increase.

AMD’s HDR correction has a defined hardware scope

The HDR gradient-banding changes target AMD display-core families DCN 3.0+ and DCN 3.2+. Igalia describes changes to lookup tables, or LUTs, including separate segmentation for encoded-to-linear EOTFs when hardware curves are unavailable. An EOTF maps encoded image values to display light output.

That scope matters if you are checking whether a particular AMD display path is covered: the reported work concerns the named display-core families and HDR gradient banding.

Lowering a cgroup’s dmem.max can wait for reclaim

A cgroup is a Linux mechanism for grouping processes and managing their resource use. The dmem controller applies that approach to device memory. When a cgroup’s current use exceeds a newly lowered dmem.max, the kernel reclaims GPU objects from VRAM to GTT, the graphics-memory path used for those objects. A normal write waits for reclaim; using O_NONBLOCK avoids waiting. If reclaim cannot bring use below the new limit, that limit still blocks further allocations above it.

The controller also distinguishes two eviction protections: dmem.min provides hard protection, while dmem.low provides soft protection. Linux 7.3 adds dmem.peak, a read-only file for peak use, and allows a write to update one memory region at a time.

The driver boundary is important for NVIDIA hardware. Linux 7.3 adds dmem cgroup integration to nouveau, the open-source NVIDIA driver. That is the integration described for this release; it is not a general feature of NVIDIA’s proprietary driver.

Igalia’s other kernel work and the V3D plan

Igalia also changed sched-ext, Linux’s extensible scheduler framework. Its contributions remove duplicate BPF-arena spinlock-node copies and make ops.cgroup_set_bandwidth() sleepable, allowing it to call operations that can sleep, such as memory allocation.

In its October 26, 2026 account, Igalia said Linux 7.3 was the last release supporting V3D 3.3 and 4.1, and that kernel support for those versions would be deprecated in the next release.