Intel Brings Up Lunar Lake Display Support For Linux
These 42 patches out for review provide the basic platform enabling for Lunar Lake display support. In total it's around one thousand lines of new code for getting up Lunar Lake display capabilities on the i915 driver side.
Lunar Lake leverages the Xe2 architecture for its integrated graphics and various minor changes were needed to the driver to prepare for its display capabilities, with some feature additions like frame-buffer compression (FBC) now being supported on all pipes.
As a reminder Lunar Lake is the 18A-based processors that will follow after Arrow Lake, which is the successor to the upcoming Intel Meteor Lake mobile processors. Given how things are pacing, Lunar Lake isn't likely to launch until 2025.
It is a bit surprising to see the i915 driver support continuing for Lunar Lake... Intel's Xe DRM kernel driver has been in development for a while now with a hope of it potentially being mainlined in the Linux kernel at least in experimental form before the end of 2023. The Intel Xe driver is designed to better support modern integrated and discrete graphics hardware, make better design choices without all of the i915 baggage over time, better support non-x86 CPU architectures, and should be more performant than i915. With it being two years or so before seeing Lunar Lake, I am a bit surprised they aren't fully committing to the Xe driver yet for the Lunar Lake generation. Either just for playing it safe with not too much work extending it for Lunar Lake or if there are concerns over the readiness of the Xe driver. In any event I certainly hope by the time that these processors ship the Xe kernel driver will be in fantastic shape and hopefully will be the default at least for that generation.
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