Intel Battlemage Platform Support Begins Landing In Mesa 24.2

The Intel Battlemage discrete graphics support is beginning to come together for the open-source Linux graphics driver stack as the successor to DG2/Alchemist. In addition to all the Xe2 work for what's found with Lunar Lake, more Battlemage Linux kernel and user-space driver work has been appearing recently. The milestone crossed today is the initial Battlemage "BMG" platform support being merged for the Mesa 24.2 OpenGL/Vulkan drivers.

The very early Battlemage platform support and device PCI IDs are now present in Mesa Git for next quarter's Mesa 24.2 release. At the moment this is hidden behind the "force probe" option and thus not enabled by default. This "force probe" concealing is the same route as the Lunar Lake platform support in Mesa that was merged a few days ago. The Mesa force probe gating relies on the "INTEL_FORCE_PROBE" environment variable for specifying the PCI device ID of the hardware you wish to activate. We'll see by the time of the Mesa 24.2 stable release in August if the Battlemage (and Lunar Lake) support is ready to be enabled out-of-the-box.

With this initial Battlemage platform bring-up, five PCI IDs are added for Battlemage G21 GPUs: 0xe202, 0xe20b, 0xe20c, 0xe20d, and 0xe212. This BMG platform enablement work doesn't present any new details on what to expect from Battlemage features or performance.

The initial Intel Battlemage support was merged via this merge request to Mesa 24.2. Here's to hoping that Intel will have all the open-source Linux driver support aligned nicely and in great shape by the time Intel Battlemage graphics cards are shipping -- which is rumored to be later in 2024. Exciting times ahead for next-generation Intel graphics atop their fully open-source Linux driver!