Coincidentally just days after AMD posted their big UALink patch series for Linux, Intel engineers today announced a proposal called DRM Fabric.

Complementing the likes of UALink or AMD xGMI, DRM Fabric aims to be a vendor-neutral, protocol-agnostic DRM topology infrastructure for scale-up interconnects for GPUs and AI accelerators.

"This RFC proposes DRM Fabric: vendor-neutral, protocol-agnostic DRM topology infrastructure for scale-up interconnects, using the model

fabric -> endpoint -> port -> peer

A fabric groups the endpoints of one provider-defined interconnect instance. An endpoint is one accelerator attachment holding its physical ports. A port reports lane capability, operational state and optional counters. A peer is a typed value naming the directly adjacent accelerator or switch port, not a reference to a live kernel object; it may identify an accelerator managed by another OS or an opaque switch in another trust domain.

The core records direct adjacency only, not end-to-end reachability or switch forwarding, which remain with the fabric controller. Vendor drivers retain hardware discovery, firmware interaction, memory semantics and the hardware-carried data path. DRM Fabric represents topology and control state of DRM-managed accelerators; it does not create a network device or own route computation, switch forwarding, transport, or congestion control.

Generic Netlink fits this multi-object, event-driven model better than sysfs, which maps poorly onto dump enumeration and asynchronous notifications, and provides the YAML-described uAPI discipline introduced to DRM by DRM RAS. Devlink was considered, but models devices and subordinate objects rather than a fabric spanning DRM devices.

Patches 1-6 form a complete, separately tested read-only milestone that can be merged independently while provisioning remains under review. Providers publish objects, adjacency, operational state and optional port statistics through a small in-kernel API; userspace queries the live graph but cannot modify it.

Patches 7-12 add privileged provisioning for software-defined fabrics. Userspace can create and delete empty fabrics, attach orphan endpoints registered without a fabric, request administrative state and manage peer adjacency, while the provider performs the hardware programming. Administrative state records control-plane intent, operational state remains provider-reported, and each port is managed either by its provider or by userspace. The mutation operations are fabric-new, fabric-del, endpoint-set, port-set, port-peer-new and port-peer-del."

This DRM Fabric aims to be vendor-neutral though as of this initial Request For Comments (RFC) state has just been worked on by Intel engineers. In their testing and interest in developing DRM Fabric in 2026 is presumably in reference to their upcoming Crescent Island AI accelerators in mind. Interestingly, Intel engineers used the public AMDGPU xGMI implementation to shape DRM Fabric's provider API.

DRM Fabric at least as of now does not define anything around data transport, switch policy, live migration, MMU programming, or other functionality. The initial patches also provide no production provider implementation.

Those wanting to learn more about this early DRM Fabric proposal for scale-up interconnects can do so on the dri-devel mailing list.