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Install Linux Desktop Environment

The ECI core images core-bullseye and core-jammy do not have a graphical desktop environment installed by default, neither do minimal or server variants of Debian* or Canonical Ubuntu*.

To install a graphical desktop environment on your system, do the following:

  1. Setup the ECI APT repository.

  2. Install the desktop environment Deb packages and dependencies. Run the following commands, replacing the <environment> placeholder with one of the Desktop Environments listed in the following table.

    $ export DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
    $ sudo -E apt install task-desktop task-<environment>-desktop
    

    Package

    Description

    task-mate-desktop

    Installs the MATE Desktop

    task-gnome-desktop

    Installs the GNOME Desktop

    task-xfce-desktop

    Installs the XFCE Desktop

    task-lxde-desktop

    Installs the LXDE Desktop

    task-cinnamon-desktop

    Installs the Cinnamon Desktop

    task-kde-desktop

    Installs the KDE Desktop

  3. The desktop environment should start automatically after rebooting the system:

    $ sudo reboot
    

Enable GuC/HuC Firmware Loading

From Gen 9th Intel® Graphics (Skylake and later), Intel® introduced Graphics microcontroller (GuC) and HEVC/H.265 microcontroller (HuC), which provide the following functionalities:

  • Offloading some media decoding functionality from the CPU to HuC (only applicable if using Intel® media driver for hardware video acceleration).

  • Low-level graphics context scheduling and context submission (GuC submission).

  • Tracking business and making frequency and power gating decisions while scheduling.

To use this functionality, the GuC or HuC firmware must be loaded by setting the kernel module parameters:

i915 Kernel Module Parameters

Description

enable_guc=1

GuC submission and power management

enable_guc=2

HuC authentication only

enable_guc=3

Combine HuC and GuC

enable_guc=7

Combine HuC and GuC and SR-IOV PF mode support ONLY available for i915/*_guc_70.0.3.bin and i915/*_huc_7.9.3.bin on Intel® firmware mentioned here for 11th Gen Intel® Core™ U-Series processors and 11th Gen Intel® Core™ P-Series processors [Tiger Lake] and 12th Gen Intel® Core™ S-Series processors and 12th Gen Intel® Core™ P-Series processors [Alder Lake]

For more details, refer to Intel® Graphics for Linux* and Linux gpu/i915.

  1. Setup the ECI APT repository.

  2. Install one of the available ECI Linux kernels. For this example, we installed linux-image-intel-rt:

    $ sudo apt install linux-image-intel-rt
    
    $ apt-cache search linux-image-intel | grep -v dbg
    linux-image-intel-acrn-sos - intel-acrn-sos Linux kernel, version 5.10.140-linux-intel-acrn-sos+
    linux-image-intel-rt - intel-rt Linux kernel, version 5.10.140-rt73-intel-ese-standard-lts-rt+
    linux-image-intel-xenomai - intel-xenomai Linux kernel, version 5.10.140-intel-ese-standard-lts-dovetail+
    
  3. Install GuC and HuC Linux firmware available from the ECI APT repository to follow both the official Linux distribution package release and Out-of-Tree (OOT) SR-IOV Physical Function (PF) mode support.

    $ sudo apt install firmware-misc-nonfree firmware-linux
    

    For example, on Debian* 11 (Bullseye) distribution, using the ECI APT repository should display:

    $ sudo apt-cache policy firmware-misc-nonfree
    firmware-misc-nonfree:
    Installed: 20230210-4-intel-iotg
    Candidate: 20230210-4-intel-iotg
    Version table:
    *** 20230210-4-intel-iotg 1000
          1000 https://eci.intel.com/repos/bullseye isar/main amd64 Packages
          100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
       20210315-3 500
          500 http://deb.debian.org/debian bullseye/non-free amd64 Packages
    
  4. Enable GuC/HuC firmware loading by adding the i915 kernel module input parameter:

    $ echo "options i915 enable_guc=3" | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/i915.conf
    
  5. After the installation is complete, reboot the system:

    $ sudo reboot
    

    When the system reboots, Intel® Graphics HuC / GuC should be enabled.

    ../../_images/Desktop_011.png

    Verify that the GuC / HuC modules are enabled:

    $ dmesg | grep i915
    
    ...
    [    5.633743] i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC firmware i915/tgl_guc_70.0.3.bin version 70.0
    [    5.650994] i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC submission enabled
    [    5.650996] i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC SLPC enabled
    [    5.651344] i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] GuC RC: enabled
    ...
    [    5.633745] i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC firmware i915/tgl_huc_7.9.3.bin version 7.9
    [    5.649831] i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HuC authenticated
    

Note: To know whether an end-user can install Intel® Graphics Compute Runtime for oneAPI Level Zero and OpenCL™ on the Debian* desktop environment, refer to the tutorial.