Intel Meteor Lake Graphics Still Experimental "Force Probe" With Linux 6.6

Sent out today was the drm-intel-gt-next and drm-intel-next pull requests of the latest Intel graphics driver feature code for DRM-Next to then be merged for the upcoming Linux 6.6 cycle. Both pull requests indicate these are the last planned feature updates ahead of Linux 6.6 but what's interesting is that with the latest code upcoming Meteor Lake graphics are still being treated as experimental.

With this latest "-next" code, the Meteor Lake (MTL) platform for graphics is still marked with "require_force_probe". With the "require_force_probe", it's effectively still advertising the Meteor Lake graphics platform as experimental.

With require_force_probe, the Intel i915 kernel driver won't be enabling the graphics by default/out-of-the-box unless you end up booting the kernel with the i915.force_probe=[PCI-ID] option for enabling the support.

Intel's driver documentation describes its force probe functionality as: "Force probe the i915 driver for Intel graphics devices that are recognized but not properly supported by this kernel version. Force probing an unsupported device taints the kernel. It is recommended to upgrade to a kernel version with proper support as soon as it is available."

It's a bit surprising, or rather concerning, that the Meteor Lake graphics are still behind the "force_probe" option with Meteor Lake laptops expected to appear in the next few months... Unless there is a last minute change, Linux 6.6 will have Meteor Lake behind this flag. Linux 6.6 will debut as stable around the end of October or early November. There's rumors meanwhile that Meteor Lake may be launched at the Intel Innovation 2023 event happening in September.

So at this stage it's looking like any early Intel Meteor Lake laptop Linux customers may have to resort to using the force_probe option for enjoying accelerated graphics. It's not clear from the public perspective why Meteor Lake still is set to "require_force_probe", but once we get our hands on such hardware after launch hopefully we'll find out -- and ideally the open-source Meteor Lake graphics support will be in good shape as the Intel Linux engineers have been working on it for quite a while. It might be a case of the GuC firmware version not yet being stable or some other minor issues. I'm expecting the overall Intel Meteor Lake Linux support at launch to be in good shape although users may need to use a newer Linux kernel version than what is currently shipped by many (non-rolling-release) Linux distributions.