Intel Works On Wellsburg Linux Support

Intel has begun releasing patches for supporting their Wellsburg chipset within the Linux kernel.

Intel's Wellsburg is the successor to the C600 "Patsburg" chipsets for Sandy Bridge-based Xeon chipsets. Wellsburg is for the Haswell-EP server Xeon processors to be released later this year. Lynx Point is the codename for new chipsets for desktop Haswell CPUs while Wellsburg is taking care of the server space. Wellsburg is derived from Lynx Point and for Haswell server processors is said to come in (to no surprise) quad, dual, and single socket configurations. Haswell-EP server processors will reportedly be available in up to 14-core configurations and have an impressive 35MB of L3 cache between all the cores.

It was nearly one year ago to the day that Intel started pushing Lynx Point support into the Linux kernel. That support has landed and overall the Intel Haswell support appears to be in good shape ahead of the product launch set to happen behind the end of H1'2013.

Hitting the Linux kernel mailing list now is more of the Wellsburg PCH enablement. Published on Friday with this set of five patches is the adding of four Wellsburg devices for taking care of the ata_piix, hda_intel, i2c-i801, lpc_ich, and ahci drivers for supporting Wellsburg. It's a bit surprising the device IDs weren't added in previously, but they're making it into the Linux kernel now and should be found in Linux 3.9.

Overall, Intel's Haswell support on Linux is quite good and I'm getting very excited to see the processors running on the Linux desktop. The Haswell graphics performance will be much faster than Ivy Bridge and there's already good open-source support, the GCC and LLVM/Clang compilers are already prepped to exploit the new instruction set extensions on the processors, and the performance/support overall for Haswell looks quite good. In fact, Haswell is getting so tidied up at this point that in the near future, Intel Broadwell Linux support will begin to surface soon by Intel's open-source engineers.