Intel & Canonical Collaborate On Graphics Preview Stack For Ubuntu 24.10

Intel and Canonical have been collaborating to provide an early "Graphics Preview" stack for Ubuntu 24.10 to provide better support for the new Intel Core Ultra Series 2 "Lunar Lake" and Intel Arc B-Series "Battlemage" graphics.

With the Xe2 graphics for Lunar Lake and Battlemage needing Linux 6.12 for support out-of-the-box as well as the very latest Mesa releases for the best OpenGL and Vulkan driver support, the current state in Ubuntu 24.10 itself isn't ideal. Plus Intel driver engineers continue pushing new Battlemage and Lunar Lake performance optimizations routinely into Mesa and other components. The out-of-the-box support should be in nice shape by the time of Ubuntu 25.04 in April but for now there is this Intel Graphics Preview Stack to ease the initial experience for Lunar Lake and Battlemage graphics on this current Ubuntu release.

This week marks the Intel Graphics Preview Stack "1.0.0" release on GitHub. The GitHub repository though is just a bash script that in turn adds an Intel graphics Launchpad PPA and then proceeds to use Apt to install the various Intel-related driver packages. From the kobuk-team/intel-graphics PPA this will grab the latest Mesa packages as well as the Level Zero GPU Raytracing support, video acceleration drivers, oneAPI VPL library, Intel Metrics Discovery/Library, OpenCL support, and other related packages.

This Graphics Preview Stack and PPA are designed for use with Ubuntu 24.10. More details on this Intel Graphics Preview 1.0.0 stack for Ubuntu 24.10 can be found via the GitHub release tag that also includes the various package version details.

I'll be giving this preview stack a shot to see how it compares with the likes of the Oibaf PPA for tracking Mesa Git and using the upstream Linux kernel from the Ubuntu Mainline Kernel PPA or similar.