Intel Alder Lake S Graphics Support Nearing The Mainline Linux Kernel

It looks like the open-source Intel kernel driver enablement work for the "Alder Lake S" processors coming to market late in the year will soon have the support mainlined in the kernel.

Over the past few months we've seen various Alder Lake S enablement patches materialize for the graphics driver support as well as elsewhere in the platform coverage. The Intel "i915" kernel graphics driver has seen various rounds of "ADL-S" patches for review but it looks like they are now tidied up enough that it should be about ready for mainlining.

Sent out this morning were the newest Alder Lake S platform enabling patches. Intel developer Aditya Swarup noted, "Most of the patches have already been reviewed and are good for merge. I will resend rest of the series once we have focused reviews on the pending patches."

Though as we are hitting the cut-off of new feature code to DRM-Next for Linux 5.12, unless a merge request is sent in this week adding the Alder Lake S platform support, it will otherwise end up likely having to wait until Linux 5.13 in the summer. In any case even hitting Linux 5.13 would still allow the Alder Lake S graphics support to be mainlined in time for making it into the likes of Ubuntu 20.10 this fall. Intel has said Alder Lake will launch in "H2" though given Rocket Lake not yet shipping, presumably Alder Lake will not reach the market until closer to the end of the calendar year. Thus the Intel open-source timing still should work out fine.

Alder Lake S is capable of driving five display outputs (eDP, dual HDMI, and dual DP++). The patches though don't reveal much else about Alder Lake considering it's still Gen12 graphics and largely leveraging the existing code paths of the Intel Linux graphics driver. This platform support code comes in at just around 250 lines of code.