Disabling VT-d improves Intel Arc GPU Linux performance on Meteor Lake and newer SoCs
In this post, I’ll check whether disabling VT-d virtualization support may improve the performance of the Intel Arc GPU in recent Meteor Lake or Lunar Lake SoC using a Khadas Mind Maker Kit with an Intel Core Ultra 7 258V CPU with Intel Arc 140V graphics running Ubuntu 24.10.
I was especially curious about the line about disabling VT-d virtualization on Meteor Lake of newer processors. So I decided to check this tip with the Khadas Mind Maker Kit, aka Khadas Mind 2 AI Maker Kit with a Lunar Lake SoC. I could install Ubuntu 24.10 albeit without WiFi, because only Bluetooth is recognized from the AX211 module… I’ll check later, and I ended up using a 2.5GbE USB-C adapter instead to update the OS before testing.
It’s there and the last line even shows Intel VT-d (Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O). I’ll run some Unigine benchmarks and glmark2-wayland. I initially ran sbc-bench.sh to optimize the system for performance and check throttling just in case:
This command does not run any benchmarks and only monitors CPU frequency, memory, and temperature. As such it requires very little CPU usage (confirmed with htop), and in theory, it should not impact the results, but somehow it hammered the benchmark score. Here’s Unigine Heaven Benchmark 4.0 with sbc-bench.sh:
