Intel Lunar Lake Thunderbolt Support Being Prepped For Linux

While Intel Meteor Lake processors only launched last week, Intel Linux engineers have already been busy for some time enabling next-generation Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake processors.

Intel engineers have been sending out Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake patches for months already to the Linux kernel as well as related open-source projects like the GCC and LLVM/Clang compiler toolchains. In the case of Arrow Lake Linux driver support it's commonly just adding new PCI IDs while Lunar Lake has been seeing more of the code churn, especially as it concerns the Xe2 integrated graphics. But long story short, with all this ongoing work and given Intel's Linux history, come launch day for these 15th Gen and then 16th Gen Core processors, the Linux support should all be in order.

The newest Lunar Lake patches on the way is enabling the USB4/Thunderbolt support. Intel's Thunderbolt Linux guru Mika Westerberg has queued up support for Lunar Lake in the Thunderbolt "next" staging area.

The enablement notes that the USB4/Thunderbolt controller with Lunar Lake remains similar to Meteor Lake. So only six new lines of code are needed this time around for getting the Lunar Lake Thunderbolt support working. This support should in turn be mainlined for the upcoming Linux 6.8 cycle.