Alder Lake S Support Added To Intel's Open-Source Media Driver

Last quarter Intel began upstreaming their open-source Alder Lake S graphics support for Linux. It hasn't been too big of a feat or revealed many details since it's still Gen12 / Xe graphics seen since Tiger Lake. But it's been coming along and over the past month is now wired up into Intel's open-source Media Driver stack too.

Merged back on Christmas was the initial decode patch for Alder lake S (ADL_S) that was just a few hundred lines of code thanks to largely re-using the existing Gen12 driver code paths.

That work is in the tentative Intel Media Driver 21.1 tag.

The Alder Lake S video decode/encode capabilities are outlined via the GitHub page but amount to the same coverage as Tiger Lake and the forthcoming Rocket Lake -- including HEVC 12-bit, VP9 12-bit, AV1 8-bit/10-bit decode, and the other existing support we've been seeing for a while.

In any case, great seeing the Alder Lake open-source driver support getting squared away many months ahead of launch with the hardware not expected to surface until the second half of this year -- more than likely into Q4. But that's one of the great things with Intel is continuing to see generally very timely open-source hardware support so it can work its way into the major Linux distributions ahead of the hardware shipping to customers.