Intel Icelake Graphics Driver No Longer Considered Alpha Quality, Cometlake Ready Too

It's just one week past the end of the Linux 5.1 merge window and the Intel open-source developers have already sent out their first pull request to DRM-Next of new graphics driver material they are planning for the Linux 5.2 release this summer.

Most exciting with this first Intel DRM driver pull for Linux 5.2 are many Icelake fixes. With this latest batch of work, they feel the Icelake "Gen 11" graphics are mature enough that support will be enabled by default where as on previous kernels it has required the i915.alpha_support=1 flag. That alpha support flag has been there just so users acknowledge the early alpha hardware support, similar to what they have done for earlier generations.

Also with this pull request is the new driver support for Comet Lake. Though the Comet Lake support isn't a surprise or anything more than new PCI IDs with being another new revision to the long mature Gen 9 graphics support.

Another exciting feature of this pull request is enabling PSR2 power-savings by default.

This pull request also has additional HDCP 2.2 support work and an assortment of other fixes. More details on these Intel display/graphics changes queuing up for Linux 5.2 can be found via this mailing list post. Expect additional feature pull requests over the next roughly four weeks.