Intel Sends Out Patches Bringing Up The "DG1" Graphics Card Under Linux

For months now Intel's open-source driver developers have been working on the "Gen12" graphics support needed most notably for Tiger Lake and more recently is also confirmed for Rocket Lake. But Gen12 is also needed for the highly anticipated Xe Graphics with the discrete graphics offerings to come in the months ahead by Intel. Building off the existing Gen12 graphics driver code, Intel today published the first DG1 patches for enabling their first discrete graphics card under Linux.

Sent out by the open-source Intel team were the initial set of 37 Linux kernel patches for bringing up the DG1 discrete graphics platform on Linux. These patches build off the already mainlined Gen12 support plus some pending Rocket Lake patches and other recent patch series like introducing the concept of device local memory (dedicated vRAM) to their kernel graphics driver that up until now has just been centered upon integrated graphics capabilities.

In going through the patches, some highlights from quickly digging through it includes:

- Initially just a single PCI ID of 0x4905 is added for DG1.

- Confirming Intel dGFX hardware is coherent with system memory even over PCIe, which was pretty much known, but at least these patches have those necessary capabilities wired up on the software side.

- As has been the case with recent generations of Intel graphics, firmware blobs are present.

Look for more Intel DG1 patches to come in the weeks ahead. Though due to the timing of the patches, they are unlikely to queue in DRM-Next ahead of Linux 5.8 thus this initial Intel discrete functionality is unlikely to be mainlined until Linux 5.9 unless there is a quick push to aim it for 5.8... In which case it's possible the Intel DG1 hardware will begin shipping before Linux 5.9 is released as stable, but we'll see how it plays out. Normally Intel is very good at seeing mainline support prior to shipping hardware, but that doesn't always turn out to be the case due to various timing issues. Linux 5.8 will see its merge window open during the first two weeks or so of June depending upon how the rest of the 5.7 cycle plays out. Linux 5.8 will see its stable release around early August then and the Linux 5.9 kernel then should debut as stable around October. Then again, Intel is planning to seed DG1 to developers so hopefully those Linux-interested folks are quite capable of building a Linux kernel from Git, in which case the timing of these patches landing is less important...