Intel Media Driver 20.2.pre1 Released With More Work Towards Gen12 + Discrete GPUs

Following the release a few weeks back of the Intel Media Driver Q1-2020 update for this open-source Linux video encode/decode driver for Intel graphics, their first pre-release of the Q2-2020 driver update is now out for testing.

The Intel Media Driver 20.2.pre1 release was made available this Monday morning. While there isn't any formal release notes out, I've been digging through the patches making up this release and the highlights are below. The main takeaways are continued fixes for Gen11 and more work on next-gen Gen12 media handling. Most notably, last week local device memory support was merged for the Intel Media Driver. This local device memory support and sorting out the handling of that is necessary for Intel's forthcoming Xe discrete GPUs. That LMEM support has been happening elsewhere throughout the Intel Linux graphics stack and has now reached their media driver in beginning to get Xe video encode/decode in order.

- Local device memory support was merged last week, part of their effort in enabling Intel Xe discrete GPUs.

- Various decode issues resolved as well as a performance fix addressed.

- Various Gen11 Elkhart Lake / Jasper Lake fixes.

- Continued Gen12 enablement.

- The MMC codec is now enabled by default for encode and decode.

The pre-release for the Intel Media Driver 20.2 can be downloaded from GitHub.