While Intel's Broadwell
processors won't be launching until 2014 as the successor to Haswell, this weekend
the initial open-source Linux GPU kernel driver was published ahead of the Linux
3.13 kernel merge window. The changes are massive and it's looking
like the Broadwell graphics improvements will be astonishing and provide
significant improvements over Haswell and earlier generations of Intel graphics.
Ben Widawsky of Intel's Open-Source Technology Center was cleared on early
Sunday morning to publish the initial kernel driver support for Broadwell. Intel
in their traditional manner has managed to publish their open-source graphics
driver support for Linux months prior to the hardware debut so that it can be
merged into the upstream kernel and begin appearing in the next round of Linux
distribution releases. For Broadwell Linux enablement Intel is pushing the preliminary
hardware support into Linux 3.13 and hopes to stabilize it and
push additional features for Linux 3.14. With the Broadwell support in
Linux 3.13, it should be at feature-parity to Haswell. With that
said, Fedora 21 and Ubuntu 14.04 LTS -- and other H1'2014 Linux distributions
-- should be in good shape for supporting the next-generation Intel hardware.
How this timing will work out for Linux end-users with "out of the box"
support will be contingent upon what month Intel begins shipping Broadwell CPUs;
hopefully it will be in Q2 to avoid some of the missteps made during the early
2011 launch of Sandy Bridge.

Intel's Haswell is soon to be succeeded by "Broadwell" and the Linux support is now taking shape and at a hardware level the graphics should be even more incredible.
Kudos to Intel and their OTC developers for getting Broadwell into shape and
so that it should hopefully be a smooth launch. This is a much better situation
than with AMD where the stable open-source support generally has only arrived
post-launch for major new GPU introductions or on the NVIDIA side where the open-source
support is still largely left up to the reverse-engineering Nouveau community,
though NVIDIA
says they will now support Nouveau.
Anyhow, being released this weekend were a set of 62 patches to the
Linux kernel for enabling Broadwell support by Intel's DRM (Direct Rendering
Manager) driver. The user-space support hasn't been released. Intel is expected
to release the libdrm and intel-gpu-tools support in the coming days and then
after that we need to see the i965 Mesa DRI driver changes plus the xf86-video-intel
DDX driver for X.Org support. For the 3D/OpenGL support by the Mesa driver, the
Mesa
10.0 code is being branched from Git master in the next few days so Broadwell
code won't likely be in released Mesa form for a few months (UPDATE: Broadwell Mesa OpenGL driver changes were pushed to a Git branch). The next
release will be Mesa 10.1 or Mesa 11.0 depending whether core Mesa achieves OpenGL
4.0 compliance and that release will be around February of next year.

The open-sourcing of the Broadwell support shouldn't come as a huge surprise
at all if you're a loyal Phoronix reader. I've already written a number of Broadwell
Linux articles, noted earlier this week that the code was likely to land soon
given the
publishing of multiple power-well support for future Intel hardware, and in
talking
about Intel graphics for Linux 3.13 had commented on Saturday the
secret is likely Broadwell. Today's Broadwell drop is similar to how Phoronix
was the first source for news on Valley
View graphics in advancing
Atom SoC graphics by doing away with PowerVR.