Intel Arctic Sound M Support Added To Mesa 22.1 Drivers

Ahead of next week's expected feature freeze / code branching for Mesa 22.1, Intel today committed Arctic Sound M "ATS-M" support for their open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers.

With Arctic Sound M making use of the DG2/Alchemist discrete GPU, all of the existing driver code paths are being followed. The ATS-M enablement in Mesa amounted to adding in new PCI IDs for ATS-M cards: 0x56c0 is an ATS-M part based on DG2-G10 and 0x56c1 is the other ATS-M card added that is based on the cut-down DG2-G11.

Back in January the Arctic Sound M support was added to their open-source Media Driver referring to it as "Arctic Sound Mainstream". Last month Linux kernel patches came for ATS-M that refer to Arctic Sound M as a server platform but without display hardware support. Again, that kernel driver side work was minimal as well with largely following the DG2/Alchemist driver code paths and just foregoing any display support. Last week a new Intel Media SDK released with video encode support for ATS-M as well.

Now with this patch adding the ATS-M PCI IDs for Mesa 22.1, it looks like the support is all in place when paired with the other latest mentioned Intel driver components. Granted with Arctic Sound M lacking display output, the Mesa support will just be for headless rendering and similar use-cases.

Intel ATS-M is sampling to their partners currently while this data center GPU should be available more broadly later this calendar year.