Linux 5.14 To Have Additional Bring-Up For Intel Alder Lake M

In recent months there has been a lot of Linux kernel patches for bringing up Alder Lake S and Alder Lake P while more recently the enablement patches for Alder Lake M low-power mobile has begun.

The Linux support bring-up for Alder Lake M has been trailing the ADL-S and ADL-P but not by much and in most cases the ADL-M amounts to adding additional PCI IDs.

So far in the mainline Linux kernel for Linux 5.13 there is Alder Lake M support with the intel_th PCI and USB DWC3 drivers but with the Linux 5.14 cycle this summer is when it looks like more of that initial enablement will happen.

Among the Alder Lake M patches pending now via various "-next" trees and mailing lists are for Alder Lake M sound support with PCH-DMIC or SoundWire codecs as well as legacy sound support, Pinctrl support, MFD Intel-LPSS, and other areas needing new PCI IDs. No real surprises in those pending patches over the new code paths already introduced for Alder Lake.

It's looking around Linux 5.14 will likely be the baseline for Alder Lake M support but we'll see what other lingering patches are still out there that will or won't make it for this next merge window kicking off in about one month's time. Normally Intel lands their Linux kernel enablement for new hardware well in advance and this time is still months out but not the margin we are accustomed to seeing out of the company, but then again Alder Lake is a big advancement and their Linux engineers continue wrapping up the Xeon Sapphire Rapids support as well.

Alder Lake is Intel's 12th Gen Core processors that most notably is a hybrid architecture of Golden Code and Gracemont low-power cores. Alder Lake is also introducing DDR5/LPDDR5 support, refined Intel Gen12 Xe Graphics, and other improvements. It will be interesting to see how the Linux support and performance plays out for Alder Lake when the next-generation processors begin shipping later this calendar year.