Intel's Icelake Gen11 OpenGL & Vulkan Driver Support Is Now Considered Feature-Complete

It looks like Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver support is now officially ready to roll for the "Gen 11" graphics to be found with Icelake, Elkhart Lake, and whatever other Gen11 graphics parts may end up coming. The latest open-source OpenGL/Vulkan driver code now marks Gen 11 as being feature-complete.

With the upcoming Linux 5.2 kernel cycle, the "i915" Intel DRM kernel driver no longer considers Icelake/Gen11 graphics to be "experimental" and it also turns out their user-space drivers are ready as well for these next-generation graphics.

A few minutes ago in Mesa Git, Intel open-source developer Jason Ekstrand dropped the warnings about incomplete Gen11 support. He notes that for both the "i965" OpenGL and "ANV" Vulkan drivers, the Gen11 graphics are considered "feature-complete" and "should be running more-or-less at [performance] at this point." Up to now when using these OpenGL/Vulkan drivers with Gen11 graphics hardware present, a warning would be printed at initialization time.

This is great to hear and hopefully we won't be waiting too many more months before seeing the first Icelake mobile parts. It's great that this open-source graphics support is squared away early allowing plenty of time for the supported Linux kernel and Mesa releases to propagate to the prominent Linux distributions for ensuring good out-of-the-box support -- a trend Intel has largely been good at for achieving well ahead of launch day going back to the ~Ivybridge days. More than likely over the months ahead we'll still see more lingering Icelake feature work happen while internally the developers are likely beginning to tackle early infrastructure changes for discrete hardware / Xe Graphics.