Intel Arc DG2 "Alchemist" Added For Mesa 22.0 But Code Disabled For Now
Landing today in Mesa 22.0, which has now been extended by three weeks for additional development, is adding the DG2 (Alchemist) device information and the twenty PCI IDs. Yes, there are 20 PCI IDs for DG2 but not necessarily for all different models planned for going to market but sometimes extras are reserved for early engineering samples, possible but currently unplanned future SKUs, and similar reasons for reserving more possible IDs per family than what necessarily appear in retail/OEM channels.
While this DG2 support has appeared in Mesa 22.0, all of the device IDs are hidden behind a "#if 0" compiler directive so they are not actually included as part of the Mesa builds right now.
Intel is waiting until the i915 kernel graphics driver's DG2 support has stabilized before exposing the dependent Mesa driver support. As of right now with Linux 5.17 the DG2/Alchemist support continues maturing in the upstream kernel but is not exposed by default either but continues to be hidden behind the "force_probe" kernel module parameter.
Thus it likely won't be until Linux 5.18 at the earliest before the kernel support is considered good for these forthcoming Intel Arc graphics cards and when Mesa in turn exposes its OpenGL and Vulkan driver support. Needless to say, barring a bunch of distribution back-ports, it doesn't look like Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and the like will be offering any out-of-the-box support for the Intel Arc graphics cards said to be making their initial introduction by the end of the quarter. Intel has been working on their Linux driver enablement for discrete graphics processors and dedicated video memory for a while now, but it's a large undertaking with their open-source driver stack up to that point only focused on integrated graphics requirements. It's coming along though and when complete the Intel Arc graphics cards will be powered off the fully open-source (sans firmware blobs) driver stack with ANV Vulkan and OpenGL Iris Gallium3D driver support we have come to enjoy and the Compute-Runtime open-source OpenCL/Level-Zero as well.
Once the Intel Arc graphics cards do make their debut, stay tuned to Phoronix to find out more about the current open-source Linux graphics driver support state and which versions/Git builds are necessary for support.
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