Intel Begins Lobbing More Meteor Lake Linux Graphics Driver Patches

With Intel DG2/Alchemist getting settled, the DRM-Next cutoff for v5.20 kernel material having passed, and Raptor Lake enablement also appearing to be in good shape given the little change over Alder Lake, Intel open-source engineers have begun working more on Meteor Lake driver support that will succeed Raptor Lake next year.

For Linux 5.20 there are the first bits of Meteor Lake that amount to the new PCI IDs and platform information. This follows other Meteor Lake graphics preparations that began earlier in the month to their other open-source graphics components. Now some of the meatier Linux i915 kernel patches are being sent out for the Meteor Lake integrated graphics support.

Sent out this morning were 23 new patches amounting to around one thousand new lines of kernel graphics driver code. The patch series is summed up as:

The PCI Id's and platform definition are posted earlier. This series adds handful of early enablement patches including support for display power wells, VBT and AUX Channel mapping, PCH and gmbus support, dbus, mbus, sagv and memory bandwidth support.

This series also add the support for a new way to read Graphics, Media and Display versions.

As confirmed with the prior Meteor Lake Linux graphics driver patches, the integrated graphics on Meteor Lake will have Xe_LPD+ Display version 14, version 13 for its media block, and version 12.70 for its graphics block. The Meteor Lake graphics capabilities from a feature perspective should be largely comparable to that of Xe HP (DG2).

Intel continues work on their Linux driver support well ahead of the product launch. Intel Linux engineers often begin posting their Linux driver patches 12+ months ahead of time for ensuring good out-of-the-box, open-source support by the time products ship.

Noted in the patch series is further confirmation of what we've been seeing lately of the new Intel graphics hardware becoming more modular, particularly from a driver perspective. It's also similar to how we've been seeing more of AMD's block-by-block enablement for new GPU support.

Going forward, the hardware teams no longer consider new platforms to have a "generation" in the way we've defined it for past platforms. Instead, each IP block (graphics, media, display) will have their own architecture major.minor versions and stepping ID's which should be read directly from a register in the MMIO space. New hardware programming styles, features, and workarounds should be conditional solely on the architecture version, and should no longer be derived from the PCI device ID, revision ID, or platform-specific feature flags.

The 23 patches out today don't reveal any groundbreaking details of exciting features for Meteor Lake but do more low-level plumbing to prepare for these 14th Gen Core processors expected to be released in H2'2023. Aside from the graphics, Intel's Linux engineers continue in preparing Meteor Lake support for the other related drivers in aiming to have good out-of-the-box support ahead of launch day.