Intel Meteor Lake GuC Firmware Support Published

With newer generations of Intel client processors having the GuC firmware binaries is now a hard requirement for accelerated graphics support. Like with AMD and NVIDIA GPUs, firmware binaries are a requirement beyond the open-source Linux driver code. This week Intel published their initial GuC firmware binaries for upcoming Meteor Lake processors.

This week the initial Intel Meteor Lake GuC firmware files were pushed to the linux-firmware.git tree. This GuC micro-controller firmware goes along with the latest open-source Intel code in the upstream Linux kernel and Mesa for enabling graphics acceleration with the next-generation processors.

As of Linux 6.4 the Meteor Lake graphics support remains experimental and requires the "i915.force_probe" override but at least the Meteor Lake firmware is now public to ease the support transition. Having the initial firmware binaries out there still months ahead of launch allows time for Linux distributions to pick-up the firmware into their linux-firmware packages for hopefully yielding a better out-of-the-box experience when these processors begin shipping.

Intel getting the initial GuC firmware out there months in advance is nice to help allow time for distributions to pick-up the files compared to AMD that generally only publishes their required firmware blobs around the time of the actual hardware launch -- typically within days of launch and thus early adopters having the additional step involved of often having to grab these firmware files themselves straight from linux-firmware.git. Or in the case of the open-source NVIDIA (Nouveau) driver is an extreme in the other direction of NVIDIA only publishing their signed firmware blobs for Nouveau consumption many months after launch.