Intel Battlemage OpenGL & Vulkan Driver Support Enabled By Default For Linux

Now that Linux 6.12 will enable Intel Battlemage and Lunar Lake graphics by default for the out-of-the-box kernel graphics driver support, the user-space Intel Mesa drivers with Iris Gallium3D (OpenGL) and ANV Vulkan are moving ahead to enable their support out-of-the-box too. This has been merged for Mesa 24.3-devel to have Battlemage discrete GPUs enjoying OpenGL and Vulkan support while it's also marked for back-porting to the Mesa 24.2 stable series.

For going along with Linux 6.12+ kernel use, Mesa 24.2+ will be able to accommodate Battlemage graphics cards. This patch merged on Monday to Mesa 24.3-devel enables the initial Intel Battlemage G21 graphics cards without requiring the "INTEL_FORCE_PROBE" override. The Battlemage PCI IDs initially enabled are 0xe202, 0xe20b, 0xe20c, 0xe20d, and 0xe212.

This patch is marked for back-porting to Mesa 24.2 stable series too. Though typically the case with new GPU support is: the newer the Mesa code, the better. Mesa 24.3 will end up likely having additional optimizations and features than with sticking to the current quarter's Mesa 24.2 series.

In the Mesa merge request promoting the Battlemage graphics to being enabled by default, a comment noted:

"gnome, firefox, few sample VK and OpenGL applications working fine"

Thus minimal insight into the Battlemage Linux support ahead of launch... Such as performance or how it's comparing to the Windows driver support. A "few sample VK and OpenGL applications" doesn't provide much insight into the overall driver health for these next-gen Intel discrete graphics, so we'll have to wait and see until launch for how exactly Battlemage is performing in general and the Linux driver support.