Early Intel DG1 Graphics Card Enablement Sent In To DRM-Next For Linux 5.9

As we have been anticipating for weeks, initial (but still early) enablement of the Intel DG1 graphics card on their open-source driver stack will indeed be sent in for the upcoming Linux 5.9 cycle and is currently being queued in the DRM-Next repository.

It was in late May that Intel sent out the DG1 patches to light up the graphics card on Linux and building off all the existing Gen12/Xe graphics code already mainlined within the kernel. Since then the kernel work has continued with other features getting squared away.

Outside of the kernel, the DG1 enablement in the open-source Linux driver stack from OpenGL/Vulkan to their Media Driver to OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero compute stack have all been flowing as well albeit obviously reliant on the kernel support. The DG1 graphics support is coming together for this initial Intel PCI Express graphics card being first catered to developers while future (and more performant) Intel graphics cards will be catered to consumers and gamers.

On Wednesday via the newest drm-intel-next pull request to DRM-Next is this "very early DG1 enabling" on the kernel side. The Linux 5.9 cycle is kicking off in August while this kernel won't be out as stable until the October timeframe.

Besides the DG1 bits, there is also other low-level code refactoring, SSEU code changes, various performance optimizations particularly around memory and mmap handling, various Gen11 and Gen12 display fixes, new Elkhart Lake PCI IDs, and a variety of other fixes and improvements.

This is anticipated to be the last of the feature work on the Intel graphics driver for Linux 5.9 while further work on DG1 and other areas will begin building up for Linux 5.10.