Intel Sends Out First Linux Patch For Clearwater Forest

While Intel's Sierra Forest as their first all-E-core Xeon processor with up to 288 cores per socket isn't launching until around the middle of this calendar year, Intel Linux engineers already sent out their first kernel patch in beginning to target its successor: Clearwater Forest.

Clearwater Forest is Intel's second generation E-core Xeon after Sierra Forest. Clearwater Forest should ship in 2025 while the open-source Intel Linux engineers begin in their driver support preparations and other hardware enablement well in advance of launch. With engineers already pushing Sierra Forest code into the Linux kernel and related key open-source projects like Clang and GCC since last year, their work on enabling Sierra Forest appears to be largely wrapping up and in turn the enablement is to begin for Clearwater Forest.

Sent out this morning was the first Linux kernel patch for Sierra Forest. As usual, for the first patch it's quite basic and is just adding in the new model number for Clearwater Forest CPUs. Clear Water Forest has a model number of 0xDD (221). The patch also reaffirms that the 0xDD Clearwater Forest CPUs are using Atom Darkmont cores.

The patch has been added to x86/urgent so will likely be sent in soon for the Linux 6.8 merge window. It's simply adding the new "ATOM_DARKMONT_X" ID for Clearwater Forest and doesn't present any regression risk while will allow new feature code to be more easily merged for Linux 6.9+ with this 0xDD patch in place. With that said, expect more interesting Intel Clearwater Forest Linux patches to begin soon.