12 Years After Haswell, Intel Open-Source Graphics Developers Still Make Occasional Fix

The Intel Haswell CPUs were originally introduced back in 2013 and great for the time. Under Microsoft Windows the driver support has long been obsolete but under Linux with Intel's open-source driver support there is still even the occasional fix all these years later. Coming up for the Linux 6.14 kernel cycle in 2025 is a fix to benefit Haswell and similarly aged Intel platforms with integrated graphics.

Following the Intel graphics driver updates earlier this week slated for the upcoming Linux 6.14 merge window, a post-holidays "drm-intel-gt-next" pull was also submitted today for this next kernel version. It's a small one given the end of year festivities but the headline change caught me by surprise:

"Here goes the post-Holidays drm-intel-gt-next PR towards kernel 6.14 as promised.

There is an engine reset improvement for Haswell (Gen7.5) and older platforms and the rest is smaller fixes and dead code removal."

There's an engine reset improvement for Haswell and similar vintage Intel integrated graphics platforms. The change comes also from Intel engineers directly as opposed to being just an open-source community patch.

Intel engineers recently noticed possible issues in recovering from engine resets after problems on Intel Haswell hardware. It turns out Intel is still running Haswell graphics as part of their continuous integration (CI) setup for their Linux graphics driver stack -- long after their driver support was discontinued on the Microsoft Windows side.

The fix is just a one-liner to increase the time to retry the "RING_HEAD" reset from 2ms to 50ms to allow proper recovery. In any event fascinating to see them devote time still to addressing a Haswell integrated graphics issue in 2025.

The few Intel GT patches part of this final round of Intel graphics feature patches for Linux 6.14 can be found via this pull request.