FRAME BUFFER COMPRESSION (FBC)(9)

💅 Frame Buffer Compression (FBC) 💅

okay bestie, welcome to the Kernel API Manual entry for FBC — that's Frame Buffer Compression, and yes the acronym is giving main character energy. ✨

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

FBC is out here trying to save memory bandwidth (and therefore power consumption) by compressing the amount of memory used by the display. It is total transparent to user space and completely handled in the kernel — user space doesn't even have to think about it. 🫶

The benefits of FBC are mostly visible with solid backgrounds and variation-less patterns. It comes from keeping the memory footprint small and having fewer memory pages opened and accessed for refreshing the display. Slay for low-footprint vibes. 💖

i915 is responsible to reserve stolen memory for FBC and configure its offset on proper registers. The hardware takes care of all compress/decompress. Literally the hardware's job, not ours. 🔥

⚠️ but bestie, heads up: there are many known cases where we have to forcibly disable it to allow proper screen updates. So yeah — iconic when it works, but sometimes we gotta shut it down for the screen to behave. 😭

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• Kernel file: ./drivers/gpu/drm/i915/display/intel_fbc.c
• intel_fbc_disable(9)
• intel_fbc_handle_fifo_underrun_irq(9)
• intel_fbc_read_underrun_dbg_info(9)
• intel_fbc_init(9)
• intel_fbc_sanitize(9)

💌 cute sign-off: source/version: ./drivers/gpu/drm/i915/display · date: October 2026 💌